Assorted Fire Events (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: David Means
- First Published: 2000
- Type of Plot: Antistory, metafiction
- Time of Work: The 1990's
- Setting: Hudson River Valley, New York
- Principal Characters: A writer, His aunt, Shank, Fenton
- Genres: Short fiction
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, United States or Americans, Dogs, Suicide, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Beauty, Obsession, Accidents, Death or dying, Fire, 1990’s, Horror
- Locales: Hudson Valley, NY
The Story
There is no single unified plot in “Assorted Fire Events.” Instead, as its title suggests, the story is a series of events about fire, related to one another only insofar as they are of interest to the narrator writing about them.
In the first paragraph, the narrator recalls one winter when he was thirteen and living in Michigan when a man set fire to several cottages. In the spring when the snow melted, the narrator loved the sight of the black charred remains of one of the cottages and adds it to his “line-up of memorable images.”
For the...
[The entire page is 1474 words long]
