Here’s the thing about short stories–nobody reads them. And I get that, having done my fair share of slogging through some mediocre short story collections (I will not name names). Sometimes the pay-off is there, but most of us read to be swept up, to learn, to escape. It’s hard to find sustenance in short stories.
Someone somewhere said, when explaining how plot works, that good novels explode and short stories implode. I like that. 12 pages can hold a charge so powerful that the shockwaves first move inwards, rattling you bones and causing the 70% of water in your body to slush around, and then the waves move out, loosening foundations and causing dust to loosen from cracks in the ceiling.
There are very few short stories that I have read that have that power. So keep that in mind, when I say that if you haven’t read Jim Shepard yet, you’re doing it wrong.
The most noticeable thing about Shepard’s short stories are how well researched they are. One story is a fictional account of the head of the Japanese special effects team on the original Godzilla film. The next is about arctic explorers. And then there is the story set in the near-future as the Netherlands are overrun with water from a melting polar ice-cap. (Want to read these stories? Pick up a copy of You Think That’s Bad)
This month, Jim Shepard’s newest release is not a short story collection at all. It’s a novel. But it is a novel that implodes.
Set in a Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, The Book of Aron is 
everything you expect from a novel of a man-made disaster. The characters are strikingly human. (Aron, a young smuggler scuttling through the ghetto, chooses his own survival over much else) Hope is a struck match; it is quick to be snuffed.
The claustrophobia of the ghetto, of what we all know is going to happen, presses the novel from all sides.
Shepard spares us from much of the horrors of the Warsaw ghettos. But the true hero of the novel (think a Polish Atticus Finch), Janusz Korczak, is unreal. But that’s the catch–he was real. Korczak, an advocate of children’s rights in pre-war Europe, he oversaw the children’s orphanage in the ghetto.
Shepherd gives the story of Korczak justice in that he doesn’t try to take it as his own. And that really is what is at the heart of what makes Jim Shepard’s stories so in tune–he compassionately borrows from the past, to give new life to what has been forgotten. He reminds us to remember.
Jim Shepard will be HERE at LEMURIA Wednesday, June 24th at 5.
Want to write your own short story? Try this short story generator.
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