Flash O' Lantern: 13+ Stories

By Todd Russell

Flash O'Lantern contains 13 original award-winning Halloween flash fiction short stories of 1,000 words or less and 13 noteworthy events that happened in October including:

Famous People in October:
Edgar Allan Poe (died), Bela Lugosi (born), Vincent Price (died) and two others!

Movies/TV released in October:
Halloween (1978), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Evil Dead and Saw (2004) and The Twilight Zone (1959)

Flash O'Lantern contains flash fiction and non-fiction that will illuminate your mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Todd Russell
• Release date: Oct 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465788092

Todd Russell

Todd Russell loves reading and writing atmospheric, scary, thrilling stories. He lives in the small city of Orting, Washington overlooking beautiful, active and deadly, Mount Rainier. Mental Shrillness, a collection of horror twist ending short stories, is his first book.His debut novel, a psychological thriller / horror story entitled Fresh Flesh was published September 29, 2011. He is working on several other books.

Book preview

Foreward

Why I Love To Flash

No, I don't love that flashing, but I do enjoy reading and writing flash fiction.

They were called short shorts when I first started writing them back in the late 1970s. It doesn't seem like it's been 30+ years, but the calendar reaper is a lousy liar. Calendars should be bordered with a black robe and have a scythe at the side jutting further out as the years pass, because they are a constant, and sometimes painful, reminder of how much time is here today and gone tomorrow. The good news is our brains keep some illuminating snapshots in our lives; brief pictures that linger.

Good flash fiction can linger too.

What follows are thirteen stories of 1,000 and under words in length. For those unfamiliar (and I'm guessing most reading this are familiar, so please forgive the history lesson) this type of story is called flash fiction and the stories were created intentionally short.

All the stories herein were written and entered into online writing contests during 2011 that had maximum word count restrictions. The stories were also the result of writing prompts offered by third party independent readers and judges.

Thirteen historical events that happened during the month of October are included too. Anybody who follows me on Twitter (@Todd_Russell) will learn that each day I've been tweeting a historical event, often with a horror slant. Therefore, including an expansion of these tweets in this collection seemed like fun.

Important October events in horror history are covered like the theater release dates of Halloween (1978), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (originally titled as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974), The Evil Dead and, the newest torturefest phenomenon, Saw. Also, the day Vincent Price and Edgar Allan Poe died and the day Bela Lugosi (Dracula!) was born. All of these historical entries are being flashed too, meaning they are 1,000 words and under. Even the foreward that you're reading this moment and the afterword that bookends this collection have been flashed.

Everything is flashing in this collection.

So here's your flash quiz: are flash fiction tales intended to be traditional length short stories?

(Answer: no, they're intended to leave some of the story to your imagination.)

Are you excited as I am to get started? To dance on the razor's edge of these tales and see how it makes you feel? What sort of thoughts, dreams and ideas will these stories prompt? What will linger beyond the end of each tale?

I look at flash fiction (1,000 words and under) as a kiss, a short story (1,001-7,499 words) as a date, a novelette (7,500-17,500 words) as a few dates, a novella (17,500-40,000 words) as a short relationship and a novel (40,000+ words) as one or more relationships. A love comparison, if you will.

Recently, a friend of mine was chatting with me about one of the stories in my first story collection, Mental Shrillness. There are nine flash fiction stories and one longer short story (7,200+ words) called The Illusion in that collection (an excerpt at the end of Flash O'Lantern is included). My friend wanted to make sure she understood what the ending of one story was saying in a greater sense about the human condition. It was a heavy topic tackled in a small few hundred words and her explanation nailed it. I complimented and thanked her for reading my story.

That's what flash fiction symbolizes in a microcosm to me. It's the writer releasing some semblance of universal control to you, the reader. Flash fiction is almost poetry-like in that the stories can be read very fast, but the weight of the words is deceptive. It's the reader's analysis of the words, the rhythm and underlying message that lingers. Why was this word used over that word? Why was this sentence so important in the overall story? Everything matters in a story that can only be a few hundred words long.

I think this is what keeps me coming back to flash fiction: that I enjoy stories that keep me thinking. I want to imagine what happens before and after a good story with intriguing