Horse should be read in one sitting. It's a tiny slip of a thing (only 67 pages, with generous margins) composed of a delicately constructed monologue; an interruption could well explode the story into senselessness, and you only get one shot to make the experience work. Told in the second person—Simmons, who has an MFA in creative writing, admitted during the Q&A that the book was an attempt to do everything that his teachers had told him not to do—Horse's painfully blunt internal monologue careens around the weird tourist attractions of middle America.
And I wrote about how you can get a free copy of Simmons' most recent collection of short stories about one-man black metal bands a few months back on Slog. This workshop will be a good way to get a jump on your New Year's resolution to write more. You should go. After all, what else is going on? I'll tell you: Nothing.
