Elijah David

This year has been a dry one as far as blog posts go. Despite being home a lot more than usual, I haven't been drawn to post as much here as I have in years past. I haven't been entirely idle. I finished the first draft of the third Albion book. I published  Paper and Thorns.  I have pulled out some old works to edit and started new ones (including a sequel/companion novella to  Paper and Thorns ). I crocheted. A lot. Since last fall, I've made 3 baby blankets, an afghan, a scarf, a throw blanket, and two stuffed Nifflers. Most of that happened after quarantine hit. And yet, this has been a season of doubt, of anxiety, of unease. I have found myself growing more and more restless and dissatisfied with my day-to-day, and even with the media I consume. Sometimes, I will pull out a familiar story just to find some half-remembered peace in its pages. I started digging into my thesis collection the other day. These stories held a special place in my heart because they represen...

I'm currently reading two short story collections --  Skin by Roald Dahl and Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro -- and the stark contrast between the two has got me thinking about my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with so-called "literary" fiction. It's not that I don't want to like literary fiction. It's that so much of it just feels humdrum, hopeless, and depressing. I tell myself I'll give the genre another try. I spend the months afterward in a speculative fiction miasma trying to get the taste out of my mouth. Anyway, the two collections differ in one major way: Dahl's stories, though grim and sometimes unsettling, have a levity to their prose, a hint of magic in the world even when dealing with perfectly ordinary people and situations. The opening stories all deal in some way with crime and passion, but they never feel like over-the-top sensationalism. Dahl has a way of making even the ordinary seem extraordinary without telling us he...