PORTRAITS IN THE DARK –Short stories by Nancy O. Greene (iUniverse)
This is an interesting bit of fiction: I started reading the stories in PORTRAITS IN THE DARK in a random fashion, picking out a story here, a story there, to get a general feel of what she’s all about. Well, I found myself intrigued, enough so to keep on reading. There are some interesting characters in the stories here, no generic types, no stand-ins for the author, no archetypes, etc, just real people; complex and disturbed people from disparate backgrounds and areas. The stories in this book come out of a well-oiled imagination, a vivid mind at work, no doubt from both experience and fantasy; a good mix.
PORTRAITS…is my first exposure to author Nancy O. Greene; my first exposure, as well, to iUniverse publishers, which is located, according to the imprint on the bottom of the inside title page, in New York, Lincoln and Shanghai, in that order; that’s kind of an odd mix of locations, huh? Anyway, I hope to read more of Ms. Greene in the near future and in the meantime I’m going to keep this one close by, so as to re-read the bright character studies from time to time. For example: “The Affair” has a darkly tragicomic character to it that ends up being the victim of his own paranoia; “Fine Print” is a modern-day, self-aware twist on “Faust” and “The End” is some kind of nihilistic fantasy with a smiley-face t-shirt on.
In all, it’s a rather short book, only 78 pages, but there is a lot of rich, imaginative concentrated escapism – a lot inside a little space. Greene makes conservative use of words, making as few as possible go as far as they can be stretched, not unlike, say, Kafka, who also was a master of minimalistic writing with a maximum imagery effect. To get more information on Nancy O. Greene or about the publisher, go to http://www.iuniverse.com – KM.