100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories, by Michael A. Arnzen, Raw Dog Screaming Press, April 2004
This book is definitely not for the squeamish. If you’re a horror lit fan, that’s probably music to your ears. It’s truly surprising how a one paragraph short short story can pack such a huge punch and leave the mind reeling for so much longer afterward than it took to actually read the piece. All of the stories in this book deliver their promised jolts, and more.
This collection begins with a piece about a surprise found in a popular restaurant chain’s “Playland” ball pit and ends with instructions on how to grow a man-eating plant. Arnzen obviously means it when he says in the introduction that good horror is the shortest and most dangerous ride in the carnival of literary genres. Each of his pieces will jar you out of any comfort zone you might be, well, comfortably reclining in, as well as possibly jolting the last meal out of your stomach and, especially, disturbing your mind as it tries to figure out just how he created such compact and hard-hitting pieces of gore. “It’s the bleeding that takes time,” he writes in the intro, “Not the injury that causes it.” This is exactly the effect each of his masterpieces of minimalist horror has on the reader.
About half of them were previously published in magazines, anthologies and online flash fiction and horror venues like Flash Fantastic. The book also includes an interview with Arnzen by Jerry Schatz. Arnzen currently teaches at Seton Hill University and recently won the Bram Stoker award for alternative forms for The Goreletter, his email newsletter. His novel Grave Markings won the Bram Stoker novel award in 1995.
