I’ve recently read a couple of books which were written with a lot of short chapters – and when I say short chapters I mean very short chapters, from a few pages to just a few words. They’re two very different books, both written with a clear idea of what they want to achieve but doing something quite different, and it’s been an interesting experience reading them in fairly close succession. I thought it might be fun to explore this experience a bit, in particular the ways in which I responded to each of the two books and their use of short chapters – there were some similarities, and plenty of differences – and in the process hopefully clarify things in my own mind too.
When I say they were very different books, I really mean it. The first was Shark Heart by Emily Habeck: a love story, and a tale of a newly married couple adjusting to their new life…which just happens to involve the husband gradually mutating into a great white shark. The second was The End and the Death Volume 2 by Dan Abnett: a military science fantasy story, the second volume of a three-part novel that concludes the epic Horus Heresy series, a story about the brutal finale of a galaxy-smashing civil war. See what I mean? You could describe both books as ‘speculative fiction’ (only just, in the case of Shark Heart), but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
Obviously chapter length is always going to be a subjective topic, and there’s certainly no one right length. Not everyone’s going to like short chapters, but if done well – and with deliberate reason – they can be very effective. Think of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, for example, which use short chapters to help maintain their propulsive pace – each chapter end is almost like its own little cliff-hanger. You might not like the style, but it’s hard to deny its effectiveness – there’s a reason why people talk about this sort of book as a ‘page-turner’, or ‘impossible to put down’! With these two books though, I don’t think their short chapters are done for the purpose of pacing (or not entirely, at least) – instead, they serve a narrative purpose, albeit a different one for each book.
Shark Heart is very much focused on the lives of its two main characters, and gradually builds a picture of the pair of them through a series of little vignettes, always concentrating on the emotions these two people are experiencing as they’re dealing with current or past traumas. Sometimes these vignettes are in the form of poetry, or structured like a scene in a play, while other times they’re regular prose, and the overall effect is unconventional but strangely powerful – all these tiny little moments stack up in the end into a sort of mosaic of the characters and their lives. It’s a smart approach in this instance, as the combination of short chapters and the mix of styles allows Habeck to cover a lot of ground without the need for long, extended scenes, all the while maintaining that focus on the two characters.
The End and the Death Volume 2 (I’m just going to say TEATD2 from now on), meanwhile, has a huge amount of narrative ground to cover – bear in mind that this has over 60 books worth of story to wrap up! With so many characters and plot arcs to wrangle, Abnett uses very short chapters to flit from perspective to perspective, slowly moving the narrative forward like a sheep dog herding a flock. It’s an approach he’s used before (in books like Necropolis) to give the reader a sense of scale, although normally it’s a case of dotting the little vignettes in here and there, interspersed amongst the broader narrative to break things up a little. Here…it is the whole narrative. I think volume 1 took a similar approach, but it somehow didn’t feel quite as noticeable as it does here.
In both of these books the short chapters do of course contribute to a sense of pace, but it’s those other purposes – building up a mosaic of small but important moments in two characters’ lives, and allowing the author to tie a large number of threads together into a single narrative – that are particularly interesting to me. What really struck me as I was reading TEATD2 though is that while the short chapters in Shark Heart were noticeable but really seemed to work in context of the story, the same approach in TEATD2 felt like it dominated the story. I enjoyed the book overall, but it was somehow overshadowed by its own structure – even now, once some time has passed, it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the book.
One obvious downside I find to short chapters is that they can make it hard to really get stuck into a book – sometimes I just want to spend a concerted period of time with a character, to get to know them and get a handle on their story. In both of these books I absolutely found that an issue to begin with, but while Shark Heart makes its teeny tiny chapters really work, and after a while I started to understand how cleverly it was building up a cohesive picture of its characters (that mosaic idea I’ve mentioned), TEATD2 felt unrelenting, and just never seemed to let up. To be fair, we’re talking about a 750+ page book with so much to cover, but it really did feel like a grind at times – or, as a friend of mine put it, like an extremely long drum solo!
Don’t get me wrong, both of these books are written very well, and I think you have to respect the choices that both authors made regarding their structure. TEATD2 is also a book that must have been incredibly difficult to write, and I really can’t think of a better way to do it under the circumstances (although personally, I’d probably have cut down on some of the less-than-utterly-essential characters…but that’s just me). But having read them both fairly close together, what strikes me is the importance of dynamics, of giving the reader some variety over the course of the book. Shark Heart does exactly that – it rarely gets above a couple of pages per chapter, but it often shrinks down to just a couple of lines, and while that sort of variation is a bit surprising at first, it really does work.
In contrast, for all Abnett’s skill as a writer, and the great work he puts in with each individual scene, TEATD2 just feels a bit one-note to me in terms of pace and momentum. It certainly succeeds in telling a compelling story overall (or at least, a third of a story), but at the cost of not allowing the reader to really relax into the story. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so obvious in a shorter book, although I also think it would really not have worked in a book which didn’t already have such a weight of story behind it…I mean, at least I was already very comfortable with who all these characters were, so it didn’t matter too much that there wasn’t really that much character development throughout a lot of the book.
Along with dynamics, what I’m coming to realise over the course of writing this article is that the effectiveness of an approach like this can also come down to complexity and length. In Shark Heart the story is tightly focused on two characters in a fairly small-scale story – combined with its sense of dynamics and a comfortable length (about 400 pages, but remember a lot of those pages only contain a few lines), the end result is something that doesn’t ask too much of the reader. In contrast, TEATD2 is over 750 pages, with dozens of characters and plot threads all competing for attention. It’s not that the short-chapter approach doesn’t fundamentally work, just that in a book of this length and complexity it all becomes a bit bewildering and difficult to keep track of. Or at least it did for me.
You might completely disagree with me, of course, on one or both of these books. And I don’t have a specific point beyond bringing up how thought-provoking the short chapter approach can be, and contrasting my own personal experiences with these two books. I’m certainly glad that I read both Shark Heart and The End and the Death Volume 2 (we’ll see how I feel after the final instalment), and I can definitely see myself paying more attention to the impact of short chapters in future books I read. Maybe I’ll pick up a Jack Reacher novel or something similar, to see how this approach is used in a different genre entirely!
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts though, whether on the effectiveness (or otherwise) of short chapters in general, or your own experience with these books. Drop me a line in the comments below, or find me on social media.
If you’d like to read more about Shark Heart, you can check out my review here.
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