To Be Continued…

Linda M. Bayley is a freelance writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. She is
the author of Estrangement: Poems.

“Give me a sprinkling of setting, a dash of character development, a
pinch of plot, little snippets of dialogue, and that’s enough,” says
Charlotte, one of Gordon Leenders’s many characters in this short
story collection. “I like stories that leave me hanging, where the
writer merely gives me a sneak peek into what’s going on and then
relies on me and my imagination to decide what’s going to happen
next.”

And so Charlotte sum up the central conceit of this collection. There
are 39 snapshots between these covers, some of them covering only half a
page. I say “snapshots” rather than stories, because while a story
has a beginning, middle, and end, To Be Continued… is a series of
middles. There is no story here. Leenders flits from character to
character, occasionally looping back to one or another, like a tour
guide who refuses to stop to allow his charges to get their own sense of
the surroundings. This is fiction for the attention-deficit set.

Leenders inserts himself into the narrative several times throughout
the book, causing his characters to say or do things that they
wouldn’t normally do in order to further his own agenda. A number of
them are quite keen to demonstrate their knowledge of Hamilton and
Toronto, for example. And one little girl has some very unusual and
detailed views on the uses of hemp. I would like to believe that this is
Leenders’ way of winking and letting the reader in on the joke, rather
than it being a sign that he’s unfocused and unable to get out of his
own way while he writes.

If you are a channel surfer, a people watcher, or, like Charlotte, just
want little bits of story, you’ll love this book. But if you can’t
stand it when other people click the TV remote just when you’re
getting interested in the program you’re watching, find something else
to read.