Blog 4 JV

The book Fatal Light written by Richard Currey, tells the story of a man that was drafted into the Vietnam War. The reader follows the protagonist from his years before the war to his most dangerous points of the war.

The book is written in a form of flash fiction. Flash fictions are stories which are comprised of very few words ranging from 300 to 1000. Although there is no real set restriction to the amount of words a story may have to be considered flash fiction.

The use of flash fiction in the Richard Currey’s novel is applied to his chapters being their own individual short stories. Although each story or chapter may not have had much to do with the previous one, the culmination of the stories creates a broader view of the overall theme. Having written the novel in this way created a faster paced read. The stories go by so fast that before the reader is able to grasp what happened in the previous chapter there is something new that’s involved. Creating a book like this was very enjoyable and grasped the attention of the reader. The short chapters were also a way to keep the reader turning the pages in order to see what the next story was about. The speed of the chapters enhances the feeling of being on the battlefield where split decisions are needed to survive.