"Now you see him" by Tim Craig (AdHoc fiction, 2022)

Flash from Ellipsis, Splonk, and several Bath Flash Fiction prize lists. "The Grand Finale" won the Bridport prize!

This will be less a book review than a review of the "genre", seeing where these pieces fit into the modern Flash landscape. I think Flash has evolved over the past decade or so. It's no more a catch-all for anything that isn't quite a poem or a story. It's gently redefining boundaries, reclaiming pieces (e.g. hermit crab pieces, or The Colonel by Carolyn Forché) that were previously categorised as poetry, and legitimising pieces that were once considered too short to be a short story. The genre has developed sufficiently for a mainstream to appear. More than before, some core elements of narrative fiction are expected, and telegrammese banned. There's no need to cram adjectives into every cranny, and repetition needn't be avoided.

David Gaffney's 2018 interview makes interesting reading. When asked about some guidelines he wrote in 2012 ("start in the middle, don’t use too many characters, make sure the ending isn’t at the end, sweat your title, make your last line ring like a bell, write long then go short") he wrote "I have changed my thinking about titles completely and now I much prefer simple title, titles that really don’t do anything other than identify the story" though he still thought that "The ending should definitely not be at the end and I still don’t much like a reveal ending or a punch line ending." He mentioned Lydia Davies' "very compressed and elliptical styles" as a new influence since 2012.

This book has a range of pieces - they have 4 lines to 2 pages; some (e.g "Northern Lights") are mostly dialogue, some have no dialogue. I'll try to categorise them more specifically below

Titles

There are one-word titles (e.g. "Eggs") and long ones like "On the Occasion of a Visit to the Aquarium, and Some Advice Proffered" (the story has 65 words). The title of "Incompatible." ends with a full stop. ""BREAKING" is in caps. In "SVU 762" the story's a continuation of the title.

Sequences/lists

• "Parts of my mother" has 7 numbered sections
• "Going Down" has a paragraph for each of most of the people in a falling lift
• "Splintering" has paragraphs each labelled by a letter - JBDGAECFKHI - which tell a story when put in alphabetical order. The section printed first is the punchline - what the narrator has been trying to avoid saying.
• "The Poor Widder" recounts 17 murders of husbands.
• In "Petting Time" the choice of pet becomes ever more extreme until the punchline ending.
• In "The Grand Finale" containers within containers are opened.

Multiple twists

In some pieces there are multiple surprises, the context repeatedly shifting. In "Hier"

• Para 1 - (in French) tells us that 7 people died in a road accident.
• Para 2 - (1st person plural) our French prof said para 1 is a poem we had to deconstruct.
• Para 3 - it's not a poem, it's a newspaper extract. We feel silly.
• Para 4 - the prof explains that the analysis has made the text into a poem. We feel clever.
• Para 5 - (1st person singular) "I wanted to let them know that - because I now, at eighteen, finally understood exactly what a poem was - their tragic deaths had not been in vain." The "We"->"I" transition has led to a cringeworthy conclusion.

Open endings

I like the ending of "Northern Lights". I'm less sure about -

• "Riddle Me This" starts with "(stop me if you've heard it.)" It tells about the puzzle involving someone who always lies and someone who never does - we can only ask them one question to find out which road leads to Baghdad. It then points out that people are never pure liars or truthtellers. So far so good. Then a nervous protagonist leaves a waiting room when their name is called. I presume it's a medical situation, not military recruitment. In the office one man is on a cupboard and another on a swivel chair. The protagonist knows that one always lies and the other always tells the truth. Only one question's allowed to work out the way to Baghdad.
• In "The Falling silent" a child goes with pots and pans into the street to scare birds, tiring them to death. I recall reading that this happened in Beijing, which is maybe why for me this section goes on too long. After, the protagonist after to play with someone but the mother bangs poets on the stove and says she needs help - "Life isn't all about having fun", she says. Is this sarcasm referring to the duty of scaring the birds?
• Re the end of "The Cake of her Life" ("they were going for a walk and that they wouldn't stop until they got to Drury Lane, if at all. If at all") - why Drury Lane? Are there allusions I've missed?
• In "Post Mortem" there's "they are both so dizzy they may fall over, because for all the kindness he has received these past months, no gift was ever as great as this" - the gift of not looking after the child?

Time

The pieces cover moments or decades. Time can pass in big lumps - "In years to come" (p.1), "Over the years" (p.3), "As the years pass" (p.15), "for the next sixty years of their marriage" (p.26), "Years later" (p.44) - though these jumps by no means all happen at the start of the final section, which would be conventional.

Several stories involve ancipitation and/or flashback, mostly particularly "Cat Barbecue" which flickers between various befores and afters. Should he have recognised the signs back then?

Meta stories and essays

"SVU 762" and "Two Stories About an Affair That Didn't Happen" feel rather meta. "That's All There Is, There Ain't No More" has an essay tone. It begins with "Cribbage is a traditional card game for two players, for example a father and his son who haven't spoken for six years, in which the object is to score 121 points while avoiding eye contact." "The B of Bang" (where the father from "Now you see him" reappears) and "Apple Green Coat" are rather essay-like too.

Bombshells and overturned expections

Surprises can happen at the end of stories. "My Friend, the Fat Somali Man" ends with "I do not know his name. I do not know how old he is. I do not know if he is Somali". The final line of "Ungrateful" flips the focus of the title. "Splintering" has a surprise in the first line though chronologically it ends the story.

There's a Flash trope where a significant piece of information appears out of the blue then disappears again. In "Pool" Carl sits on the bottom of a pool looking up through the water at Christa, his partner. His thoughts drift, including the bombshell that Christa was "staring at him from a different world the way she did when the nurse told them there was no heartbeat". Bubbles rise from his mouth into "the breathless heat of the day" - they're not getting on well.

Strange spreading

"The Unwelcome collection" has miniature buildings taking over a house, and an unexpected, good, ending. "Profuse" has flowers filling a house.

Objects as protagonists

A Bomb ("A bomb by any other name") and a knife ("Day of the Knife") are both 3rd person protagonists.

Individual pieces

• In "The Grand Finale" a husband comes home after a tour and goes straight to bed, barely ackowledging his wife, leaving her to unpack. After opening 9 containers within containers she finds "an empty condom packet from which, with a flourish - and a sound of triumpant applause ringing in her ears - she extracted the children, the house and half the money". This ending ties up with the title. The husband's a magician. Her behaviour emulates one of his tricks. I wondered if he should have been an escapologist, she finding the means to escape from a sad marriage. There's an attempt to make the containers interesting, but I still found the list a little too shaggy doggish.
• I'm drawn to the symmetry of "Planes, Horses and Planes".
• In "Now you see him" a father's remembered for being able to disappear when conversation became awkward. At the end when he's in a hospital bed they strapped him down and sealed the exits, but when they said they loved him he still managed to escape.
• "Pool" has no punctuation - it's a single sentence (a sub-genre).
• The first sentence of "Suerte o Muerte" begins with "The". The next 4 sentences start with "He" and the remaining 5 start with "If".

That so many categories are required attests to the variety and interest though I think quality sags a little from p.23 to p.38. My favourites include "Cat Barbecue", "Northern Lights", "Now You See Him", "Heir", "Peacocks", "That's All There Is, There Ain't No More"