A Short Story Review

Yesterday I posted about the new zine, "Moon Milk Review" and suggested that you should read some of the stories before submitting. Taking some of my own advice, I read "Beds" by Karen Heuler. http://www.moonmilkreview.com/2010/02/08/beds-by-karen-heuler/

Opening a speculative fiction story with a sentence like, "There were twelve beds in the hospital ward today; tomorrow there will be eleven." is guaranteed to keep the reader's eyes on the page. Now, I'm not fond of more than two or three characters in a story this short, but Ms. Heuler handles the occupants of the beds perfectly and you are never confused as to who is who in the story. The beauty part is, that everyone in the story is someone we know, or could have run into, in the real world.

Like most short stories, this one is focused on one simple scene, that of a nurse dispensing medicine and the doctor choosing which bed is to leave the ward. The richness of this story lives in the layers of the story. Each patient's fear of having their bed chosen to leave, their fear of what's to come if they are chosen and their weaknesses as human beings. The ending is so simple and yet complex as you see their reaction to who is chosen and the reader is left to wonder at their feelings of .... What? You expect me to give away the ending?

My only nit with this story was all the semicolons. When you stumble over a punctuation mark in every other sentence it tends to slow a story down, at least for me. Other than that, I loved this story and highly recommend it.

There's also a link at the end of the story to an interview with the author. http://www.moonmilkreview.com/2010/02/08/author-talk-karen-heuler/ Nice to know that Ms. Heuler is a top shelf short story writer.