In college, my creative writing class was told to read The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. I don’t actually remember what the point of the assignment was, but I do remember finding the novella incredibly boring. So I said so. I couldn’t understand why anyone would focus on the mundane quite so much, especially when the main character had just turned into a frigging bug.
Fortunately, our Assistant Assistant Editor, Stephen Schwegler, was in that same class and ready to set me straight. He gave a rousing speech explaining how the mundane was, in fact, anything but. It was in the miniscule details that we could envelop ourselves in the story; it was the boring stuff that made it possible to connect with a giant man-roach. Mr. Schwegler brought the class to tears and changed my reading habits irrevocably.
Or, possibly, he just threw something at me and called me an idiot. We may never know for sure.
Regardless of how events actually played out, the conversation was eerily prescient, somehow foretelling this very issue of Jersey Devil Press. The five stories herein – by Henry Sane, Autumn Hayes, Steven Gumeny, Matt Rowan, and Andrew S. Williams – have taken it upon themselves to embrace the mundane – whether it’s reading, cheese, or a positively Gregor Samsa-like work ethic – in the face of the decidedly not mundane. And that’s the beauty of it, really. It’s in that nothing, in the conversations and the day-to-day routines of con artists and security guards alike, that everything happens.
Huh. Guess I did learn something in college after all. Thanks, Steve.
If you want to learn something too, or just read some kick-ass short fiction, then click here for Issue Nineteen. Or click here for the for .pdf version.
