Tricky one: Short stories as novels?

What do one Brit­ish cult author, mainly of com­ics, and a can­on­ized Cana­dian author have in com­mon? Space as fic­tion­al organ­ising prin­ciple! Both Moore’s Voice of the Fire and Humphrey’s The Frozen Thames are short story col­lec­tions, chro­no­lo­gic­ally arranged, and focus­ing on one (uni­fy­ing) set of sym­bols. The first amounts to a loc­al his­tory of the author’s homet­own of Northamp­ton, the second travels up and down the river Thames, but focuses on all the implic­a­tions winter, ice, death, and his­tory may have.

It was quite tricky find­ing illus­tra­tions for this set: most of the Northamp­ton pho­tos I  traced at Google Earth. The very first thing you’ll notice if you look at the town at the centre of Moore’s nov­el at GE will be the extent to which Moore has depar­ted in his fic­tion from the (rather mundane) mod­ern Northamp­ton his con­tem­por­ar­ies would recog­nize. Northamp­ton, indeed, becomes a magic­al place — suit­able to a prac­ti­cing magus, one sus­pects. http://www.arthurmag.com/2007/05/10/1815/ No prob­lems find­ing old pait­ings etc. of the frozen Thames, on the oth­er hand, which is a nice remind­er of the fact that Humphreys’ choice of space for her short story col­lec­tion has fas­cin­ated gen­er­a­tions: not a pecu­li­arly Cana­dian obses­sion, therefore!