Improbably enough, the new issue of the Missouri Review contains two amazing stories worth blogging about. And they’re right next to each other! I hope to blog about Jonathan Starke’s “What Happens to Heroes” soon enough, but given the long lapses that tend to pop up between my blog postings… we’ll see…

Here is something that good stories do: make you very scared from very early on that something very bad is going to happen. But then the success or failure of the story is in the dénouement - how does that tension resolve? It needs to surprise you. Either the terrible thing comes to pass, and it’s a DIFFERENT terrible thing than any of the ones you were imagining… or nothing terrible happens, but the nothing happens in a fresh and exciting way.

I’m not going to say which approach Diane Simmons adopts in “Yukon River,” but the reader’s anxiety about all the ways this story can go horribly horribly wrong pays off. Voice is the real achievement here - which you know from the short first paragraph of the story: “It’s mostly drunk Indians where I’m working at the moment. Better than mostly white guys. Indians just drink. White guys, it’s got to be you look like somebody.”

There’s only about three and a half real characters here, revealed in tiny little pieces so that we fill in most of the blanks ourselves. The story feels like something you’ve never heard before, and that’s another thing that good stories do.

Incidentally - here’s some good design. The photo was what stopped me, with its evocative sense of the human world vanishing into the natural one…

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