The Shack and Other Stories

By Edward Clay Morgan

The Shack and Other Short Stories. A collection of crime and mystery short stories by Edward Clay Morgan.  An old man finds a girl held captive in a rural ranch. A cop shoots and kills a suspect on his first night riding alone. A rancher gets vengeance when justice goes wrong. A predator becomes hunted. A hitman has the tables turned on him. Too late, a serial killer learns a lesson about St. Nick.  The Shack and Other Stories explores the outcomes of violence and people who work in the gray areas of morality - people who will commit an act of evil for a good purpose.  The Shack and Other Stories is a short story collection of criminally short but hard-hitting stories that will leave you thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: E.C. Morgan
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393118954

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I love the short story.

That’s about the simplest way to put it, but it is a form of storytelling I’ve enjoyed for many years. And in case you are curious, Neil Gaiman and Steven King, followed closely by Joyce Carol Oates, are my favorite short story writers. They are masters of the short format.

There’s a great comfort in a novel. It’s a long process, a commitment, to read a novel. It is easy to become involved in the characters and to care. I liken it to a long-time friendship. You get to know the person. You grow close. When they are no longer in your life, you feel a longing.

A short story is different. It’s like the person who is in and out of your life quickly, but leaves a mark on you not easily forgotten. You can’t quite shake them from your memory.

I’ve read some great novels but it is the short story that sticks with me. I remember being in fourth or fifth grade and reading Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell Tale Heart. Nearly 40 years later, it is a story that still is prominent in my memory. Or the nice twist in Stephen King’s Popsy, which I believe is one of the best short stories written.

The short story today is not really appreciated. There’s not much of a market and most of what market exists is digital and poor paying. Most digital short fiction publications don’t last long at all. In fact, most of the previously published stories in this collection first appeared in magazines that are now defunct. However, the encouraging thing is the short fiction digital magazines keep popping up, so maybe there’s hope.

That said, I’m a very slow short story writer. There are stories in here, like The Shack, that took more than a year to get to a point where I was more or less (usually still less) satisfied enough to say the end.

This collection has two things you’ll find in most stories I write.

One is the idea of a gray area between good and bad, hence the title of the collection. In other words, is it OK to commit and act of evil in the name of good? They are also little slices of life. A peak into the world the characters live and move in. It’s not a long glance, but enough to make you wonder about the people who populate the story.

The other theme in many of the stories, but not quite all, is the gun.

We hear a lot about guns today, but one thing is certain. For better or for worse, for good or ill, legal or illegal, guns are weapons or even tools. Their usefulness is entirely up to the hands that hold them. And they are used extremely well in most stories in this short collection.

THE DONUT SHOP

Author’s note: The Donut Shop originally appeared in the now defunct digital publication Shred of Evidence.

Shred of Evidence was a great place to