Stories for An Enchanted Afternoon is one of my short story collections. It includes the Hugo Award winning novelette, “Millennium Babies,” as well as some Reader’s Choice winners like “Coolhunting.”

Golden Gryphon is offering these books at a reduced price for the holidays. Here’s the press release, along with the titles of the other books he’s offering for sale.

Greetings from the Gryphon!

Gary Turner

By the way, there are some really good books on this list. Dale Bailey’s story, “The Resurrection Man’s Legacy,” is one of my favorites. Andy Duncan’s fiction is always a revelation. Richard Lupoff & Ian Watson are two of the most inventive writers I’ve ever read.

Check out Golden Gryphon’s site. The books they produce are high quality and beautiful, filled with excellent fiction.

Kris

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine has published my story, “Discovery.” It’s actually based on an incident that Dean and I and Scott Edelman witnessed in 2001. (Scott wrote about it on his blog back then, but I’m not sure it’s still up.)

I only recently got my author’s copies. The issue is no longer on the stands, but you can order it directly from Hitchcock’s. Just click on the image above.

As I mentioned in the September Recommended Reading, a book I read inspired me to write an essay on reader expectations. I have a hunch this essay will extend to two or more, hence the title.

I had to wait to write this essay until my reaction to that book cooled down. As I mentioned before, I don’t believe in trashing other writer’s work. I see no point. At some level, it all boils down to taste. I like to hear when someone enjoys my work, and I’m sure other writers do as well. I also appreciate it when someone points out a book I might enjoy. That’s the impetus for the Recommended Reading part of this website.

The book that started me thinking of these essays was by an author whose work I love. The author (whom I will now refer to as A) wrote a novel that’s one of my all-time favorite books. When A came out with a new novel after too long an absence, I picked it up immediately.

The novel is a cross-genre blend of historical fiction and fantsy. It takes a major historical event and promises to add magic. The event is so major, even the most historically illiterate among us would know it. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to say that the event is the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s not. It’s not even close (by years, location, or involvement). But it shares a sudden moment, the kind that changes history in an instant.

The novel that A wrote sets up Pearl Harbor. We meet the characters. We see the magic. We even start to understand how important it would be.

Then our hero gets attacked. He saves the world as we know it–off stage!–which was annoying, but there are still 10 pages left. I figure we don’t need to see how he changes the world because we’re going to go through Pearl Harbor with him. But…no. We reach the edge of Pearl Harbor, there’s a white space, and then we have a sweet little scene with the love interest thinking how the world has changed.

I was sooooo mad! I was reading for the alternate Pearl Harbor. I wanted the big magic fight. The book had promised me all of this and more. And did not deliver AT ALL.

A few days later, the short story workshop started, and we talked about reader expectations. Here’s what I usually say to the students:

In the beginning of every story, the writer makes a promise to the reader. The writer must deliver on that promise by the end of the story. It’s what the reader expects–and it’s what the reader deserves.

So how does the writer make that promise? First, by genre. A romance reader will be extremely upset if there is no happily ever after. A mystery reader will get angry if the crime doesn’t get solved. A fantasy reader will be furious if there’s no magic after all.

What else does a writer promise? Well, usually a story starts with the protagonist. We expect to go through the story with that person, see the person grow and change, and survive the story. If the protagonist does not survive, we have to know on page one:

“On the day that Joe Sixpack died, he walked to the Ready Mart for his usual case of beer.”

Lots of books start that way. Now the reader is expecting to read about Joe and how he died.

Good writers know how to satisfy those expectations. Great writers can subvert them. One of the reason’s Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was so shocking when it came out was that he promised to tell the story of Janet Leigh, small time thief, and instead, he kills her spectacularly 20 minutes into the movie. He built on those expectations by having a major star play what we thought was the lead.

It’s a tribute to his storytelling ability that we stayed with the story–and it became a classic. Books do this well and often (Robert Crais did so in L.A. Requiem). To do it, you have to understand reader expectations and reader reactions so that you can mitigate them.

How do you learn all of this? By reading a lot and judging your reactions. I went back to A’s book and tried to figure out why A had made me so angry. And it was because A hadn’t delivered on any of the promises from the front of the book. I read 317 pages of a made-up fantasy world with no pay off. In essence, it became a bad literary novel at the end. (Literary novels have expectations as well–everything will resolve in an emotionally or intellectually satisfying way. When I say bad, I mean that this book meandered through the setting and characters–and had no point.)

By reading a lot you will learn, over time, how to guage reader reaction. You will know that books where the protagonist dies at the end–with no warning at all–upset you (and not in a good way). You will see how other writers have solved that problem and still managed to kill their protagonists. You’ll note the ways that the good storytellers figure out how to tell the story they want while dealing with reader expectations.

My favorite example that everyone should be familiar with comes from another movie. In The Fugitive’s most famous scene, Harrison Ford’s character jumps off a dam into the reservoir below. He should have died. The viewer thinks “No one can survive that. I don’t believe it.”

So what happens in the next scene? Tommy Lee Jones is talking to one of his assistants. The assistant says, “Well the investigation is done. Only one man in a million can survive that.”

And Tommy Lee Jone says…”Until we find the body, we’re assuming he’s that one man.”

And of course, he is.

Reader (Viewer) expectation problem solved. We can go on with the story now.

See how easy it is? And how hard?

Over time, as I find well written examples of satisfying reader expectations, I’ll point them out.

I have a new story out in At The Scene of the Crime, edited by the excellent mystery writer Dana Stabenow. It’s an anthology of forensic investigation stories. Mine is a bit odd–no murder, I’m afraid, and a very small crime. But I’m quite pleased with it.

As I expected, October turned out to be a difficult time for my leisure reading. (And for my TV viewing—my DVR started randomly deleting things [even the items I had saved] because it ran out of space. Fortunately, everything is rerun on some sister station these days, and I didn’t lose much.)

What I did read outside of the workshop came in stolen moments—an article here, a short story there. Fortunately, most of my stolen readings were excellent as well. Here are the things I liked this month that have actually seen print:

October, 2008

Eggers, Dave, “The Future of Words,” Esquire, October, 2008. A brilliant essay on the future of reading, using facts, figures, and just good old fashioned logic. I also reference this piece in my Dated Essay of the Month for October, so check that out as well. I found Eggers essay inspiring, marvelous, and refreshing. It’s very short, so follow the link now and read it. You’ll be happy that you did.

Oates, Joyce Carol, “Hi Howya Doin,” Ploughshares, Spring 2007. Some of the Master Class students pointed me to this story while we were discussing all the tools a writer has at her disposal. This Oates story is excellent—about 1700 words with a nifty little twist at the end. But it wouldn’t work if she had written it in a conventional style. The entire piece is one sentence—and it has multiple points of view. Now I know, that sounds dull, but it isn’t. It’s the story of someone running (jogging), with the promise of a police report at the end, and somehow she manages to mimick the act of running on a trail with lots of other runners nearby. The promise of the police report adds tension.

The story is phenomenal. I’ve been rereading it since the students pointed it out to me, trying to figure out how it works. (That’s the mode I get into when I teach.) The punctuation is simple; I get what she’s doing. The points of view, on the other hand, will require more study. They’re seamless.

Of course, most of you reading this could care less about technique. You want to know if it’s a good story. And it is. It’s amazing. But then, so is Oates.

Russo, Richard, Bridge of Sighs, Vintage, 2007. When I chose Richard Russo’s newest, Bridge of Sighs, to read during the Master Class, I did so because I knew that Russo’s spectacular writing would hold me through my exhaustion and the extremely critical mood that the Master Class always forces me into.

The Master Class requires me to think about fiction from a craft perspective, analyzing all aspects of it. That attitude creeps into my leisure reading, making it hard for me to read writers whose skills might be perfect for the story they’re telling, but might lack certain refinements—the very things I’m focussing on during the teaching.

Few writers can stand up to such scrutiny. The storytellers, who focus on plot, often have thin characterization or nonexistent setting. The beautiful writers, who focus on description and language, usually lack plot. I read primarily for character, setting, and plot, and when I’m in a highly critical mode, a writer who misses one of the three loses me immediately.

This is not the writer’s fault. It’s mine, and I know it. So I chose Richard Russo, whose plots are subtle and refined, whose characterization is so superb that I feel like I’ve met everyone he describes, and whose settings are so well realized that they become another character and are often, as in Empire Falls, the point of the story itself.

Bridge of Sighs met all of my expectations of Russo’s work and more. He held my attention, even when I only had time to read 5 pages in an evening, sinking me back into the story of Thomasville, Bobby Noonan, Lucy (Louis C. Lynch, he of the unfortunately nickname), Lucy’s wife Sarah, their parents, children, and friends.

The story is a generational saga, told mostly through the eyes of Lucy Lynch and Bobby Noonan, from the earliest memories of childhood through their sixtieth birthday (both men were born in the same year). Noonan fled Thomasville as a teenager; Lucy never left. But the town, its people, and its strengths influence both of them, and inform the entire novel.

To tell more of the plot is to ruin the book. The plot doesn’t come togheter until the very last line, although the read is compelling. But what held me wasn’t so much “what happens next?” as “how are these people, and this town, going to make it through this incident, that incident, and this crisis?”

A beautiful work, strong and lyrical. One that I will remember for a very, very long time.

Shepard, Lucius, “A Spanish Lesson,” The Best of Lucius Shepard, Subterranean Press, 2008. Even though Lucius is one of my all-time favorite short story writers, I somehow managed to miss quite a few of the stories collected in his Best of. “A Spanish Lesson” is one of them. I read it the night before the Master Class began, nearly a month ago as I write this, and I can still recall the story and its details vividly. A story that reads as if it’s semi-autobiographical (the POV character’s name is Lucius) gains a lot of power from that hint of realism. Interesting characters, unique situation. Exactly what I expect from a Lucius Shepard story.