Earlier this year, we helped our friend Sue Jones to publish her two novels, ‘The Legacy’ and ‘The House where Nobody Lived’ via KDP. More recently, she decided to put her collection of forty-two short stories together and publish them too. I had thoroughly enjoyed hearing a selection of them, over the past couple of years, at our local writing group, so I was very pleased to be able to proof-read and format her ‘Long Tall Short Stories’.
Sue Jones is a talented writer whose skill and imagination takes her into many different genres. Her stories are of quite differing lengths, too. A few are under a thousand words but still manage to tell a good story. Others are two or three thousand words or more, with a bit more development and plot. Some feel well-rounded, others stop a tad more abruptly. One or two, she tells us, are based on real incidents (with all names and details changed, of course) but the majority are from her active imagination.
While I liked all her short stories - which include, as the blurb says, everything from vampires to vicars - a few stand out in my memory as extra special. The delightful ‘Megamoggy’, for instance, is an enormous cat, who manages to fall off a balcony onto a baker’s van. Or there's the memorable church mouse ‘Horace’, who gorges himself at Harvest Festival.
The stories are arranged alphabetically rather than by length or genre. The first short story, ‘A Change of Heart’ is a more typical magazine style short story, about someone who is soon to get married, until an unexpected letter changes her mind due to learning something shocking. But even with this fairly standard plot, there’s a somewhat unexpected (and entirely satisfactory) ending.
Some of the stories have a lot of humour in them - when Sue read ‘A Royal Presence’ at our writing group some months ago, for instance, we were all laughing in places. ‘The Last of the Communion Wine’, too, is very amusing - all the more so if read aloud.
But they’re not all light-hearted. Some stories are poignant, some are sad. Some touch on important contemporary issues. And some are just bizarre… it’s an ideal book to dip into, perhaps on holiday, or to read when you just have a few minutes available.
The final story, ‘When the Bough Broke’, is possibly the most poignant of all - it’s quite short, and I found it extremely moving.
All in all, I would recommend this collection highly to anyone who likes quirky, mixed short stories, to adults or older teenagers.
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