There’s a theory that short fiction is the perfect panacea for modern life. As our attention spans grow weak on  a diet of digital gruel and as our free time clogs up with late-night work emails, enter the short story as an efficient fiction-booster administered daily on the commute between suburb and CBD. I love this theory, and I will forever resent Jane Rawson for exposing its flaws in a 2018 Overland article on the subject. Rawson explains that most time-poor readers prefer to dip in and out of long novels, where they can greet familiar worlds without the awkward orientation period required by a new text. In contrast, says Rawson, collections of ‘stories plunge you back into that icy pool of not-knowing every 500, 800, 2000 or 5000 words. Who wants that? Pretty much no-one, if bestseller lists are anything to go by.’

Here Be Leviathans by Chris Flynn

University of Queensland Press, $32.99 pb, 240 pp

Rawson’s logic might bode ill for three new Australian short story collections, all of which exhibit an experimental flair liable to scare off the trilogy crowd. For example, Chris Flynn’s Here Be Leviathans doesn’t even extend the courtesy of allowing its readers a human guide. Instead, all but one of the stories are narrated by either an animal (bear, fox, platypus, sabretooth tiger) or object (airplane seat, gun, hotel room). The collection is part of a wave of Australian works giving voice to the non-human, including Flynn’s own Mammoth (2020), which featured a Greek chorus of prehistoric fossils chatting in a museum.