Fairy Tale Spotlight: Warm [Short Story Review]

"Warm" is a short story written by Bob Strothers. It was published in 2012. A lot of the recent stories I have been reading have been coming from a magazine called "Down in the Dirt."  I gotta say... I have not really been enjoying them. They are either too politicized or pointless with hardly much of ending. I'm not asking for every story to inspire me; but I do want to feel like I was not wasting my time by the end.

"Warm" is just such a story. It's about a boy and his mother who become suddenly homeless. A whole lot of bad things happen to them, one after the other. The mother is arrested, and the boy ends up lost and alone with no one to turn to. It honestly just keeps getting worse, and it does feel a bit contrived to pull at the heartstrings. I worried that the whole story was going to be like this.

The whole tale has a direction problem. It jumps to a complete different character right towards the end and just barely manages to deal with the problem the boy has by the end of it. I won't spoil it though, not that there was a lot to spoil. The ending did not really resolve much, and it left me with a lot of questions as to the fate of everyone.

I have read tragic stories before. It is a very hard genre to write in. You have to strike a balance between showing the tragedy while regulating the mood and interest of the reader as you go. There also needs to be a concrete ending. I'm serious. Especially in tragic stories, you have to end it. It is one of the greatest disservices you can do to your reader if you pull them through the mire and then give them nothing. This story does that, and I don't recommend it.

This blog was written on July 22, 2024.

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