The Corset & the Jellyfish by Nick Bantock

With a work of short fiction, a reviewer usually has two choices. Either talk about the work as a whole - maybe it's a tightly-themed collection, or a fix-up - or go into detail for each individual story, if they're really separate pieces.

Today I can't really do either of those things.

The Corset & the Jellyfish was Nick Bantock's new book last year, a collection of one hundred "drabbles" - stories of exactly one hundred words. It also, possibly, has a loose link to his most famous work, the "Griffin & Sabine" series of heavily-designed and -constructed epistolary stories. For the last complication, Bantock claims that the whole book also incorporates one final uber-drabble, made up of precisely one word from each of the hundred pieces here, in that order, to tell a hundred-and-first story.

(My assumption is that Bantock wrote that uber-drabble first, and then constructed the book around it. Well, if the uber-drabble is even real: within the metafiction of the book, it's a theory, so Bantock might even be playing a different game here.)

So: there is no overall story to cover. And I'm not going to write about a hundred extremely short stories, either. If I had the time and inclination, I'd dump all of the text into a spreadsheet and see if I could get a GenAI tool to comb that for coherent potential uber-drabbles - it seems to be a solvable problem, one that would be tedious by hand but could be quick with the right tools.

This is a short book: it may have a hundred stories, but they only add up to ten thousand words (plus the introduction), so it's roughly the length of a novelette. They are very various, each setting out a somewhat quirky situation - Bantock isn't making pun drabbles, as some do, but many of them are gently humorous and none are overly serious.

There are also little colored pen-and-ink drawings, one for each drabble - Bantock's introduction specifically says that they are supposed to line up to the stories, but that organization was lost, so the way they are arranged in this book is probably "wrong" - which Bantock calls "petroglyphic creatures" and "icons." It is hinted that they were drawn, within the world of the story, by his fictional Sabine.

It's pleasant and amusing and short. I only read the original three "Griffin & Sabine" books, thirty years ago when they were a sensation - I see there was another trilogy a decade later, and then a standalone in 2016 - so I suspect readers more invested in this metafiction will find more in it than I did. But what I did find was just fine for a short, light book.