Short stories have long been my favorite literary art form (says the guy currently trying to plot his first novel). Stephen King once referred to the short story as “a kiss in the dark from a stranger,” and I concur— there is something both fleeting and unexpected about the best short stories that captures both the immediacy of poetry and the storytelling engine of the novel. I plan to highlight a story here every week that I recently read or re-read; I’m guessing most will be weird or dark or both, since that’s what where my literary compass points on most days.

I first discovered Edward Bryant as a character and a book reviewer, not a fiction writer. Bryant features in several Harlan Ellison nonfiction essays (someone I read voraciously as a young adult), and was a book reviewer for both Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine and Locus, serving as the chief horror critic for the latter for over a decade. I didn’t read any of Bryant’s fiction until I stumbled across a library copy of Night Visions 4 in the late Eighties, which featured six of his short stories. I’m sure that wasn’t why I picked that book up— it also had a handful of Dean Koontz stories and a couple of my favorite Robert R. McCammon yarns— but the Bryant stories were memorable enough that a few resonate over thirty years later. One, “Buggage,” made me toss my book across the room, but still…memorable. 

“While She Was Out” was originally published in the first issue of Kristine Kathryn Rush’s celebrated hardback magazine, Pulphouse. It’s a “woman in peril” story— not my favorite subgenre of suspense tale, not by a long shot— but it is also about a lousy marriage and how that marriage is re-contextualized following a moment of crisis. Bryant starts and ends his story with the unhappy couple, but the bulk of the story takes place in a mall parking lot and the surrounding woods, where our long-suffering wife and mother is attempting to escape a quartet of homicidal youths she has managed to piss off. The story is expertly paced— the 19 pages fly by— and the violence is contained enough that it shouldn’t be offputting to too many readers. Still, all of the action is less of interest than what that action reveals about the emotional state of our main character. Our lady is angry, and it’s her anger that could arguably be her most formidable weapon against the thugs she faces here.

Like many short stories, it all comes down to the ending for me. And Bryant nails it— he crafts an ending that is a)surprising, b)feels inevitable, and c)wraps the story up nicely from a thematic standpoint, while revealing the changes in our main character via the events of the story with only one action and one line of dialogue. This is one of those stories that improves in stature the more you reflect on it, as Bryant does what most professionals do: make the hard stuff look effortlessly easy.
So…is this one of Bryant’s best stories? It could be. Again, the type of tale told isn’t my usual cup of tea, but Bryant gets so much mileage out of a hoary old suspense trope that I come away very impressed. So did a lot of people: it was reprinted in four other anthologies and was the basis of a 2008 movie starring Kim Basinger. I’ve never seen the movie: excellent short-story writer and critic Adam Troy-Castro said it was a color-by-numbers affair. I could see that, as this is a story that is much more than the sum of its parts. You can find it in the Best of Pulphouse in e-book on Amazon, nestled next to many other worthy stories.