Snapshots

Book excerpt: Each story within Snapshots places the characters in situations where their past behaviors will be changed in a moment that is like a snapshot picture: freezing in time who they are in a moment but facing new challenges that will alter that snapshot and create a new reality. Eudora Welty’s quote “A good snapshot keeps a moment from going away” is a theme that permeates all of the stories in Eliot Parker’s collection of short stories, Snapshots. These stories are set in West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. In the plots of the stories, the makeup of the characters is more interesting and important than the circumstances that the characters find themselves trying to manage. Each protagonist finds themselves in a complicated set of personal and professional relationships. By their nature, relationships are complicated. The protagonists in these stories are shaped by their backgrounds, life experiences, and expectations of other people. Conflicts arise for these protagonists when decisions and choices made by others alter the expectations and circumstances expected by the protagonists. In each of these stories, the lives, values, and beliefs held by the characters are deconstructed and each of them face a new reality brought on by an experience or situation that forces them to reexamine who they are and who they need to become. Each of these characters occupy a variety of professional spaces: cops, a rich, successful couple, convicted criminals, and others grieving the loss of a loved one and grieving the absence of love.