It is hard to say what makes a good short story collection, assessing the quality of one story is hard enough, let alone many. A short story collection can manage to delight and disappoint at the same time; it can push the boundaries and simultaneously stay safely within them. There are no rules on how to construct a short story collection. One may strive for coherence, a uniting of themes, of sentiment, imagery, then again one may not – the stories may flit between genre, time and space. Also, the length of a short story may stretch the notion of ‘short’ to its very literary limit, essentially constituting a baby novella, or, ‘short’ might seem a little far off the mark, being closer to poetry rather than prose.
So, with these difficulties in mind we turn to Stephanie Victoire’s collection The Other World it Whispers. Here we have nine stories…