A loophole is something that you slip through to get out of a difficult situation, or perhaps something you can use to your advantage. Susan McCreery cleverly uses this ambiguity, often within relationships in the stories but also in the sense of the stories themselves – leaving things unsaid in a way that the reader has to work out how the story ends, or perhaps continues.
As a dabbler in creative writing I know how difficult it is to write so concisely and make every word count, something I have yet to achieve! McCreery also writes poetry and I think that’s how I approached and appreciated these very short stories, as prose poems. For instance in Mother’s Day on page 7:
Driving south, to the supermarket, I see a makeshift placard on the side of the road.
FLOWER
Noun or verb?
The choice is breaking me.
Just 4 short lines, 25 words but what a wealth of meaning one can read into it. Why would someone advertise a single flower or did they just forget the ‘s’? Is it meant to provide inspiration for those mothers who read the sign to mean that today is their day and they should ‘flower’ – burst into bloom and express themselves? Or more mundanely, merely a reminder to stop and get some flowers for your Mum, as you have forgotten it’s Mother’s Day? McCreery expects her readers to be smart enough to follow through the implications and/or to draw inferences from the tales and decide for themselves what the outcome might be.
Microfiction is not a genre which has immediate appeal for me, as I prefer books I can ‘get my teeth into’ but once I appreciated that Loop Holes is a book to be dipped into on numerous occasions rather than being consumed at one sitting, I found myself reading, then rereading the stories – stretching my imagination to build on that of the author and perhaps deciding on a different ending the second time around.
Reviewed by Jan Kershaw
Rating out of 10: 7
Released by: Spineless Wonders
Release Date: December 2016
RRP: $22.99
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