On "Villa Monterey Apartment, Burbank" by Meg Pokrass (368 words) ***

A shame that Pindeldyboz ceased publication in Spring 2010, as it was a source of so much great literature on the Net. But I can understand the editor's exhaustion, the desire to lay down and let other, younger journals take over the role. Here's one of the stories one of the contributing editors chose as a favorite, by one of the best writers doing flash, often online. In this tiny piece, a girl spends time with her older sister and that sister's boyfriend. Like Los Angeles, things are splashy and nice but something sinister and not quite right lurks underneath, even if we can't see it. Read the story here at Pindeldyboz.

On "My First Serial Killer" by Julie Innis (1484 words) ***

Humor is often the result of taking a low culture item and placing it among high culture or vice versa. Or taking something deadly serious and putting it into a much less serious context--or more often the opposite. Innis's story works such techniques very well, placing the serial killer story into the realm of relationship gone disappointingly mundane. By the end, one wonders which person is more crazy and smiles the whole way. Read the story here at Pindeldyboz.

On "Finders Keepers" by Ravi Mangla (347 words) ****

I've become a fan of Mangla's work largely through a social networking site I read on from time to time. Mangla's been one of those whose work has been consistently interesting--and consistently good. In this little piece Mangla turns the old safecracking story on its head and gives us something, in fact, literary. Read it here at Pindeldyboz.

On "Rod and Gun Club" by Marcelle Heath (655 words) ****

Try this for a tight story. Heath makes every word count. I had to read the piece twice to a clear sense of what's going on, but it's short enough and beautiful enough that it was well worth it. I'm going to read it again. And again. She's got the ambiance of a country club/beach club down. Little details like the jump that the dessert cart takes on the bunched-up section of carpet make this story what it is. Add to that some kind of intrigue, some kind of danger, and you're in for quite the read. Read it here at Pindeldyboz.

On "Naming the Giraffe" by Lynn Watson (304 words) ***

Something seems missing in this story. There's a tension, a set of events, that underlies everything after the first paragraph, but the cause of that tension is a mystery that is only hinted at as one reads further. First we learn that . . . but I won't go into the details and ruin the story for you. Each revelation is a bit like discovering a maggot in your food, each one bigger than the next. This is flash fiction that succeeds at doing what flash fiction does best--evading the story, making us curious, making us want to read and know more, and never giving it to us. Read the story here at Pindeldyboz.

On "Some Things You Should Know about Me before We Meet" by Josh Honn (1037 words) ****

Some stories take what should be a rather mundane subject and put them in a form that makes them, if not fresh, definitely funny. Amy Havel does something similar in her story "Enough Said" that I blogged about earlier--telling us a story of a relationship in a few simple phrases repeated over and over, until the story takes on a tragic tone. Here, Honn tells us the story of a relationship in the form of a letter--an introductory letter. The concept makes the whole story seem preposterous, and yet in that is the humor, because although we know all these things are indeed quite likely, we pretend that they aren't. There is an agreement to be silent. What if, however, we all gave such spiels before dating? Wouldn't it be so much easier? No expectations beyond what we already know . . . Read the story here at Pindeldyboz.

On "Diary of the Living Dead or: Are You There God? It's Me. Also, a Bunch of Zombies" by Jake Swearingen (1758 words) *****

This is "literary fiction" plucked from the corpses of bad horror movies. I suppose I could wax on about deeper meanings and find some kind of significance to everything that is happening, but I'm finished with grad school and so just happy to wallow in its brilliance on a purely superficial level. This is piece is laugh-out-loud funny, and that's reason enough for me to highlight it here. Imagine Sartre in a zombie movie; imagine him writing a diary about it. You get the idea. Now read the story.

On "Permanent," by Mary Phillips-Sandy (781 words) ***

Here's a horrifying story, one probably more horrifying than many others that try too hard. It's a simple nightmare--one's teeth begin to fall out. What do you do? Unfortunately, as I've noted in reviews about one sad thing about the Internet preference for shorter rather than longer pieces, the story, doomed to stick to its short word count, seems to simply drop off, so we're left wanting more, left feeling like the last two-thirds of the story isn't here. But it's a great beginning, and the fact that I'd be willing to read something three times this long shows it executes what is here well. Read the story here.

On "The Undiscovered Country, Apparently" by Andrew S. Taylor (1284 words) ****

One of the amazing things about Pindeldyboz is that it comes out every two weeks and always manages to have at least a couple of good stories in it. Some other journals come out four times a year and don't manage to have a single decent story in them. I don't know how Pindledyboz does it--perhaps, it has gained a reputation of publishing fine material. It also helps--and hinders--that the publication limits writers to twenty-five hundred words. Helps insofar as that many words, I find, really is about the limit of my online reading tolerance; after that, I'm likely to click away or resort to printing the thing out. Hinders in that sometimes it seems like writers are constrained by what really is a fairly difficult set of parameters. I mean, how many of the great stories really occur in such a space? Pick up nearly any Flannery O'Connor piece, any Raymond Carver piece (outside of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love), any Chekhov piece, and you're dealing with twice that number of words generally. Andrew S. Taylor's story, I think, may be a case in point. I love this piece. He takes an ordinary situation--a drink falling at a party--and turns it into a strange almost science fiction experiment. Tragedy is averted--or perhaps created. But then, given the need to wrap the story up, the piece, to my mind, fizzles out right at the end (or perhaps, arguably, it goes on a couple of paragraphs too long). But the first nine-tenths of this story is absolutely fantastic. Read the story here.