Saturday, March 10, 2012

Review:The Last Train Home and other stories by Erin Lawless

The art of the short story is one that, when mastered, produces artfully compact, tantalisingly brief episodes with characters and settings. It is a dreamlike - or nightmarish - encounter with characters that have, at one point or another, chosen to etch themselves in the minds of their creators. To create one good short story  - let alone several (The Last Train Home contains 16 beautifully formed pockets of life) - requires an ability to form characters in a mere sentence and an enthralling storyline in less than half a paragraph. Short stories are essentially dreams captured on paper. 

Thankfully this is a skill Erin Lawless possesses. In The Last Train Home and Other Stories, she somehow manages to capture her audience's imagination within an instant over and over again. 

While many of the stories featured in The Last Train Home seem to follow a similar formula involving a two person interaction, Erin Lawless has succeeded in making the reader feel as though they have just consumed several different bitesized tales. Perfect for a quick delve into fiction on the commute home.

And while each story is self-contained, there's certainly room for some of these snippets to evolve into novellas, serving as prologues or key chapters in a longer creation. 

The Last Train Home is a collection of short stories, self-published by author Erin Lawless. It is available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon at a snip for just £1.84

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