Short Story Review: Shards by Ian Rogers

A fun twist on a cabin in the woods story

A group of five friends rent a cabin in the woods—the next day only four are alive. What happened and why is something the survivors are desperate to unravel.

Image by Greg Ruth

Not just another cabin in the woods story, Ian Rogers’ novelette is a great example of taking a common horror trope and transforming it into something new and exciting.

You can read “Shards” here. I am not shying away from spoilers, you have been warned!

I discovered this creepy tale in Ellen Datlow’s fourteenth volume of The Best Horror of the Year. I highly recommend you read the story. It’s a longer short story, but you won’t be able to put it down. Below is a quick review of the plot after you read:

• Five friends take a trip to a run down cabin, Marcie, Donna, Chad, Mark, and Annabelle

• Marcie explores the cellar space and finds a strange gramophone with a “shard” of black glass used as the needle.

• Upon bringing the gramophone, all hell breaks loose. The night ends with Marcie dead and dismembered, the remaining friends are found covered in blood and in shock.

• The story is then told through the seasons:

  • Summer: Donna can’t shake the cold. In an attempt to warm up, she sets fire to her house and is engulfed in the flames still shivering

  • Fall: Chad can’t take the silence. He’s searching for something, anything to fill the quiet each day. He has to find the song the gramophone played

  • Winter: Mark can’t sleep. He goes on walks through the night and finds himself at the police station. He breaks in, in search of the evidence from that night in the cabin and finds the glass shard from the gramophone. Mark joins Chad in search of the song.

  • Spring: Annabelle spins. She can’t stop spinning. Her spinning takes her back to the cabin where she finds Mark and Chad.

• With the remaining four friends at the cabin, Annabelle brings out her father’s revolver. Police find the bodies a week later

This summary, of course, doesn’t do the story justice. There were so many great lines. Marcie is “singled out for being single.” Annabelle is haunted by the “images of Chad and Donna, their naked, sweaty bodies locked together […] with the empty vodka bottle next to them, spinning, spinning, spinning.” Rogers’ words really hooked me in and I couldn’t stop reading. 

(On a completely different note, who is subscribed to Scribd? It’s by far my favorite book subscription company. Can’t recommend enough!)

Point of View

What first pulled me into this story was Ian Rogers’ choice to write the story in the omniscient point of view. This all knowing narrator point of view has mostly gone out of style in modern literature (third and first person are more common). It’s a difficult point of view to pull off, especially in short story (I’ve tried and have’nt succeeded, yet). Rogers tells the story in an almost documentary-like format. He moves seamlessly between the narrator sharing enticing information, like the opening line (quoted below), and the main plot.

The omniscient narrator drops in little hints of what is to come, keeping the reader going to find out more.  For example: “The grief counselors and psychiatrist would later say the survivors mutilated their friend’s body because it was the only way they could externalize what they had done.” I mean, how could you not read on??

The omniscient point of view also allowed Rogers the opportunity to move from character to character. We start with the five friends, but after the horrific night, we follow the detective visiting the graphic scene, and finally time passes and we visit each of the remaining friends through the seasons. The story is larger than just one character’s point of view and Rogers masterfully moved from one character to the next. I need to continue revisiting this story to figure out how he did it.

Character Development

There is a general rule in short stories: number of characters should be limited. Each character needs space to be fleshed and out and developed so the reader cares about each character or at least relates to them. Adding too many characters to a short story often leaves the author with too little space to fully develop each one. I often find myself having to go back and refine character development in my short stories (and longer pieces too, for that matter). If the reader doesn’t care about the character, you have no story.

Of course, rules are made to be broken. Rogers opens the story with five different characters and manages to craft five people that leap off the page in the opening scenes of the story. I find his dialogue most impressive in showing us who these five friends are. We get to know each of them by watching them interact with each other. 

The dialogue between the friends is carefree and fun. These are five people that have a strong bond (since early childhood, according to the narrator). Rogers crafts this wonderfully. We relate to each character, care about them as they mess around in the childish way college students mess around. These are five innocent people. We don’t want anything bad to happen to them, but this is a horror story, so something horrible has to happen. For example:

Spinning, Spinning, Spinning

I picked up some craft in the way Ian Rogers used theme and repetition in his short story. He begins this tale with the word absurd. “An absurd notion,” “an absurd kind of sense,” “a fact that – strangely, absurdly– provided more support.” Rogers set the reader up for the absurdity of this story. We are ready for a wild ride.

I also enjoyed the repetition of spinning through the story. The dizzying addition adds an element of disorientation that is utterly frightening! We start with the game of spin the bottle, but the empty vodka bottle doesn’t stop spinning. For Annabelle, the spinning never stops.

We get a further sense of the spinning with the circular nature of the plot. We start at the cabin, then cycle through the seasons, and finally end back at the cabin for the tragic ending. Around and around we go, the pieces of the story fitting together seamlessly. I challenge you to take it a step further, start the cycle over again and reread the story!

Music in Literature

Finally, the song is thread through the pages. I have read a couple pieces recently involving music: Daisy Jones and the Six and Wylding Hall. (On a similar thread,

Pulp, Pipe, & Poetry

wrote a piece on listening to music that I found so helpful in bringing music to prose) I find the notion of writing about music so fascinating. Skilled authors make the music leap off the page with words alone. Definitely something to strive for. The fact that the song in Rogers’ story is just chaotic discord is even more unnerving. The characters need to get away from it, but they can’t escape.

Conclusion

I could keep on writing about Ian Rogers’ story, Shards. While Tor is not a small publishing platform, it is a great space to discover fantastic speculative fiction writers.

Did you read “Shards"? What did you think of the short story? I’d love to chat about it! Did you enjoy the story? It’s a longer short story, what part drew you and kept you ready? Did you not like the story? What turned you away? Share your thoughts below.

I write these reviews to lift up authors! Check out these indie authors for more great reads: