Curio is an echapbook originally serialized at uncannyvalleypress.com, it is now available for kindle or in epub format. The cost is a tweet or post to your facebook wall (i.e. it’s free). Find out more about Lauren Ellen Scott at her blog. As the title suggests, this is a collection of micro-fictions, like tiny figurines you’d find in a curio cabinet. Mostly, they create impressions that imply plot. The closest we get to a traditional story with a beginning and an end and stuff in between is in the longest pieces. There’s “Moon Walk” – an annual midnight walk during the harvest moon when people see Areta, a girl who is supposed to have died at the hands of a drifter. And there’s “Last Seen Leaving” – the story of Shasta who’s body was recovered in a muddy field years after she was seen leaving a Metallica concert. Or “First Anniversary” – an elderly couple come upon a man named Kevin who has broken his ankle and they drive him to the local hospital while making sardonic comments about him and his wife and their questionable marriage. The collection is dark, rural, terse, morbid, compact, ghostly. It’s also funny, with sentences like this: “Mr. Snow had a terrifying thought: I might be kissed tonight. His imagination was a poor speller.” I’m adding Curio to my list of evidence that the online indieverse is thriving and full of worthy offerings. You just need to know where to look.
See my review of Laura Ellen Scott’s novel, Death Wishing.