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Reviewed by Lee Ashford for Readers' Favorite
“Very, Very Short Stories” by Mike Spears is a small collection of six very, very short stories. Several of the stories have some merit to them, but they are all similar in ending very abruptly. I realize flash fiction tends to do that; something about a word limit, I believe. However, the stories in this collection would have benefitted from, at the very least, having an actual conclusion, rather than just stopping. Having said that, let me hasten to add that these stories were all rather well-written, and they all had a plausible theme worth writing about. Some of them would be worthwhile for the author to expand upon, building perhaps a novelette out of a flash fiction idea. ALL would have been better had they not been constrained by the arbitrary limitations of flash fiction, but instead were just written as standard short stories, having all the usual elements of a complete story.
Mike Spears has managed to amplify some decent morals into very short stories, which isn’t an easy thing to do. A very short story with a moral is, in fact, somewhat rare. Several of the stories in this collection are a bit on the macabre side, but most are really just little slices of life, but life is sometimes macabre. A few of these stories will make you think, and that is never a bad thing. I would recommend these stories to anybody who finds they often have very small windows of spare time on their hands; these would be perfect for filling those trips up the elevator, or waiting at the ATM line.
