Reading Short Fiction Again

I have recently resumed my old habit of reading short stories, as opposed to novels (I'm still plugging away at Robert Ludlum's Bourne Trilogy, though). In doing so, I have been abruptly reminded of the entirely different nature of short fiction.

Short fiction, it needs to be noted, has very few rules that need to be obeyed, unlike novellas and novels. A longer work needs to create a viable setting with characters and a reasonably logical progression of the plot that leads to a climax and resolution. While a short story may indeed feature all of these, often one or more of the above elements of longer literature is deemphasized or even largely ignored.

One can be lazy while reading a novel, but with a short story the words have a much greater intensity and purpose. If your mind drifts for a couple of paragraphs, you're liable to get lost and have to backtrack! I have had this experience on more than one occasion with my recent reading.

Often a short story is presented as a puzzle: an enigmatic setting or mysterious characters dominate the tale and the reader tries to solve the mystery. Sometimes the answer is revealed at the end; sometimes it isn't, but subtle clues left throughout the story lead to the solution (which is one big reason why you have to read carefully). Then, sometimes you're left at the end of a story wondering why you just wasted your good time reading it, with the only consolation being that it was short!

The current anthology I'm reading is Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy, Volume II, edited by Al Sarrantonio. As the title implies, fantasy is the general theme. I have Volume I as well, but this was the book that I happened to pull out of my "book box". I have noticed in all of the disparate, vastly different stories I have read from it so far one trend that unites them: their endings all left me feeling unsettled and hanging out there in the breeze. I wonder if this phenomenon has more to do with the editor's personal tastes in literature than the nature of the genre itself. Or is the modern short story a slave to this pattern...