SOURCE: Curb, Randall. “All in the Details: A Fiction Chronicle.” Southern Review 34, no. 1 (winter 1998): 76-88.

In the following excerpt, Curb discusses the pessimistic and dark nature of the stories comprising After Rain.

Writers who thrive on the short-story form and rarely if ever write novels are at their best when challenged to seize upon the few “telling” details that will particularize without diminishing. A man in a story can be precisely described by the clothes he wears, but he must not appear to be summed up by them. Despite the genre's concision, caricature or facile judgment is disastrous; what is indispensable to the traditional short story are close-up sensory detail and the subtle mapping of psychic landscape. The rest is a matter of style, structure, and point of view. The reader should be the one to bring moral exigencies to bear, if he or she is so inclined...