O. Henry’s writing is stunningly good

I have an omnibus of O. Henry’s fiction. Every now and then I’ll stumble into a reason to pick it up and read one of the stories. Yesterday, the reason was one of Brandon Sanderson’s top 5 videos, where he and a guest share some top 5 favorite. His guest was Mary Robinette Kowal, known for her expertise at writing short stories, and teaching the craft. (Her guest lecture in Sanderson’s BYU class is *great*).

One of her picks was *The Skylight Room* by O. Henry. I read it and marveled at the economy of world-building, the confident application of imagery, and the gut punch it delivers in the end. The language is simple and marvelous, written with a wink at the reader. Yet in the end it has you thinking about everything that happened, what it means for society, what’s acceptable. And he does this again and again.

The structure is remarkable, too. O. Henry paints a scene, almost a procedure of finding and renting a room with “you” encountering the characters about to play out the scene he’s building. Then he repeats the scene with the main character, and you can’t help but connect and empathize with her, because “you” just went through that.

And he digs into the superficial and selfish “caring” of the people surrounding the main character, the vibrant Miss Leeson. You get another overview of what’s about to befall her, and then the writing diverts for a moment, just a paragraph or two, and it happens… Such an amazingly powerful story in such a compact head-space.

The imagery is incredible, too. >!Miss Leeson’s room is likened to a coffin or well, where all is darkness, save for the patch of night sky seen through the skylight. Climbing the stairs to the room becomes turned upside down, made into a descent into the underworld. This is even touched on earlier in the story with Miss Leeson’s phrase “higher but lower.”!<

I’ve read other of his stories, like the classic *The Gift of the Magi* and again, O. Henry packs so much emotion into such a short structure. For any of you that have read his work (William Sydney Porter, writing under the pen name O. Henry), which one stuck with you? Why?

by SlowMovingTarget