Predator and Prey” - A Short Story by Steve Wade - 2019

Irish Short Story Month Year Ten

Predator and Prey - A Short Story by Steve Wade - 2019

A Post for Irish Short Story Month Year Ten

Click here to read the story

Gateway to Steve Wade on The Reading Life

A Wide Ranging Q and A Session With Steve Wade 

This is the fifth short story by Steve Wade that has been featured on The Reading Life.  I first read his work during Irish Short Story Month Year Three in 2013.  I found his short story “The Land of the Ever Young” fully qualified to stand with the great occult fairy tales of Sheridan Le Fanu or Andrew Lang.

“The Land of the Ever Young" recreates and helps us understand the stories of fairies stealing human children and substituting changelings for them.  Part of the root of these stories comes from the famine years where people had to find ways to deal with the starvation of their children.  On another darker side, this story also  treats of the fact that one more hungry child could be the tipping point in a family on the edge of starvation that send everyone else into the grave.  

First and foremost 'The Land of the Ever Young" is a tremendous lot of fun to read.  Joseph Sheridan le Fanu or Andrew L)ang have no better stories than this.  I will tell enough of the plot to give you a feel for it but I want you to read this story without knowing too much about it.  

The other  stories covered show the extent and depth of Wade’s range. (Some of the stories can be read online at links found in my posts).

Today’s story (readable online at the link above) “Predator and Prey” is a very interesting and entertaining dystopian story with an ending I did not see coming.

I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot.  

Martin Dailey has just been released from his term in a correctional institution.  He lives in a society ruled by the strictest tenants of politically correct behavior,with the males of the society under strict  observation.

I will share a bit of the elegant prose of Wade:

“Seven months spent in a correctional facility, Martin Daly had been released that morning. His crime – an accumulation of social misdemeanours ranging from language misuse to anti-social behaviour. He had dared to flout the law by having the temerity to put together sentences of his own instead of sticking to the utterances programmed into his brain. But the aberration which really convinced the presiding judge of his delinquency was Daly’s perverted need for the attention of young women his own age.”

In just a few pages Wade pokes fun at some of the extremes of our society.  I urge any into short stories to read this and other stories by Wade.  I hope to follow his work for many years.  

Steve Wade is an Irish Writer and English language teacher. A prize nominee for the PEN/O’Henry Award, 2011, and a prize nominee for the Pushcart Prize, 2013, his fiction has been published widely in print and online. His work has won awards and been placed in prestigious writing competitions, including being shortlisted among five in the Wasafiri Short Story Prize 2011, a nomination for the Hennessy New Irish Writer Prize, and Second Place in the International Biscuit Publishing contest, 2009. His novel ‘On Hikers’ Hill’ was awarded First Prize in the UK abook2read Literary Competition, December 2010 – among the final judging panel was the British lyricist sir Tim Rice. His fiction has been published in over twenty-five print publications, including Zenfri Publications, New Fables, Gem Street, Grey Sparrow, Fjords Arts and Literary Review, and Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. www.stephenwade.ie

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