I threw the book out of the window because it was shit. Everyone had raved about Gone Girl but I'd guessed the twist pretty quick - it was like We Need to Talk About Kevin all over again. So, I opened the car window and tossed it out. My fiancée slammed the brakes on, throwing us against the seat belts.

"Go back and get it," she said.

"But it's shit," I said.

"Go back and get it or we are breaking up."

That seemed like the worst thing, that I'd upset my fiancée so much by something so careless. Worse was to come. I found the book in the undergrowth, but it was not alone. In that same place, by some awful breakdown of chance, were dozens of copies of Gone Girl.

Background

Last year, I submitted a couple of pages to Peakrill Press’s Krill magazine. I produced a two-page ‘Best Of’, featuring 12 short stories on the space of an A4 page1. Somehow, Gone Girl was missed off, and I’m not sure how.

This story was written at Not for the Faint Hearted, the creative writing event I ran with Ellen de Vries. After burning out from doing remote sessions, I now miss these events. Everyone produced interesting work, and I’d often come away with pieces I wanted to keep.

(I’ve been thinking recently about how the work I love best is written fast on a blank page, and how the pieces I plan and plot are a little less effective. I need to get back into fast writing)

I can’t remember why I took against the novel Gone Girl so much, but I still dislike We Need to Talk About Kevin. They were both readable, but I think they were overwhelmed by their twists. But then they were also books that I read because I’d heard buzz around them, rather than because I thought they’d suit me in particular.

Background

Last week, I made the claim that the novella was a neglected form. AlexS replied on the Indelicates discord:

I was intrigued by you saying the novella hasn't taken off. Between ebooks meaning a shorter book is no longer necessarily the higher cost-per-page it once would have been, and the rise of the little book as a fancy design item, I think of them as having been in much better health this past 15 years or so than they'd been for ages, if ever.

I’ve been saying got years that the short story and the novella haven’t taken off as much as I’d expected. I think that’s definitely true of the short story - even with the Kindle and social media streams as ideal hosts. But maybe AlexS is right, and the novella growing. So I looked back at the list of books I’ve read and there are some great tiny books in there from the last couple of years.

• Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

• Hotel by Daisy Johnson

• Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley

• Cairn by Kathleen Jamie (a collection of poetry and micro-essays)

• Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli (he’s produced a number of short books on physics)

• And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin

• Lanny by Max Porter

• And a couple of novellas by Adrian Tchaikovsky

That list includes a few short-story-collections-as-novels, which is an interesting genre of its own. Two of these (Hotel and Barrowbeck) started as Radio 4 series.

I still think the novella is less popular than I’d expect it to be, but maybe there’s an element of confirmation bias in my saying it’s not growing. Maybe this is something I need to think more about.

I’d definitely love to hear novella recommendations, particularly for horror. Another great thing about novellas - it’s less risky to follow suggestions from other people about what to read.