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Monday 22 May 2017

Splinter by Michael Bussa


A pleasant hour’s reading. This is a short story…but packed with punch. In this mini psychological thriller, Adam has been wheelchair-bound for twenty-one years after a tragic incident and lives with Ada, his sister. His psychiatrist wants to help this young man who has remained troubled, seemingly traumatised by the event. Believing that finding out what actually happened will help this young man, he makes every effort to uncover the truth. But it’s not plain sailing.


Writing a short story requires technique. There isn’t much time to captivate the reader and every sentence has to count. There still has to be a start, a middle, an end, the plot has to have some meat on it, and the reader has to care about the characters. With the requirement of economy of words, they have to be carefully chosen.

Bussa has achieved all of the above in little under eight thousand words and managed even to throw in suspense. There are a couple of twists. I’ll be honest…I did actually guess them early on, but I must stress this wasn’t because they were obvious...more like an intelligent guess!

If you like short stories and psychological thrillers, you need look no further.



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