Every once in a while, I get into a short-story kick, and I try to consume a whole collection at once, most often by a single author (though anthologies can also be appealing). Some of my favorites from recent years include The Nine Billion Names for God by Arthur C. Clarke and The Brides of Solomon and Other Stories by Geoffrey Household. This time, I decided to go back a bit further in time with Jack London‘s When God Laughs from 1911.

One would think that, with humanity’s terribly short attention spans these days—see Quibi or Tik-Tok!—readers today would prefer a good collection of short stories to a 300-page novel. For whatever reason, though, it seems that the short story genre has become a forgotten favorite, something relegated to the periodicals and specialty magazine of yesteryear.

Perhaps I’m wrong, and there’s an entire sub-genre of short-story blogs, but if so, they’re nothing I frequent. Instead, I like finding these collections or anthologies either on my Kindle or on audio, and thankfully, since this book was published 109 years ago, this entire collection is available for free on such platforms as Librivox.org and Gutenberg.org—so if any of the stories sound remotely interesting to you, I encourage you to check them out.

When tackling collections like this, I like to review each story individually. Sometimes the story literally went in one ear and out the other, so a few reviews may be light on discussion and simply just a plot, in which case you can figure I didn’t enjoy it all that much.

01. “When God Laughs” – This was a very interesting story with which to begin an anthology. It’s a love story, and then again, it’s totally not. This married couple spent their entire lives pursuing a love uninhibited by physical contact, pursuing what they dubbed “satiety,” or total satisfaction. They loved life, yet in the end, their pursuit of a totally satisfying love and complete life was nothing more than a concept. “It was for the inordinate desire for joy that they forewent joy”—that thing they pursued most was the thing they despised most. It was the pleasure-delaying mentality taken to its ultimate extreme, and I’m pretty confident that Jack London thought them fools. I’m with him there!

02. “The Apostate” – Johnny is a twelve-year-old laborer back in those days before strong laws against child-labor. His mother was “an anemic whirlwind of solicitude and maternal wrath,” while his 10-year-old brother—all but ready for the workforce himself—was being preserved for better things, like school and success. Johnny, that “patient little angel and a good boy,” falls ill and fails his family during those weeks when he’s laid up in bed. But doesn’t he deserve the break? Shouldn’t this 12-year-old adult be allowed his rest as he props his family up upon his sinewy, pre-pubescent shoulders? Man, I’m glad I didn’t grow up in 1911!

03. “Wicked Woman” – This romance-of-sorts was annoying at first. I recall listening to it while searching for fossils in Utah, and I had no clue what was going on. The story was convoluted and silly—but then we reach those final paragraphs, and the whole tale comes into focus. In the end, I actually loved the innocence of it all. It’s definitely one I’d read again, now that I know the ending.

04. “Just Meat” – In this story, two jewel thieves discuss their philosophies of the afterlife while at the same time trying to determine whether the other is going to kill him. The ending may not be a massive surprise, but the delivery was expertly done. It’s stories like this, likely forgotten by posterity, that inform modern readers about an author only famous for his Alaskan dog stories but who was comfortable writing about the grunginess of life on all levels. Jack London truly was a master of the good, thought-provoking yarn….even if his stories are so incredibly dated.

05. “Created He Them” – This story was a bit unclear and hard to follow. We readers are confused about this man who wants to “help” his brother: to help him either institutionalize himself at the sanitarium to which they’re headed, or to shoot himself in the head over in those bushes during this pit-stop. Either will do, apparently, and I’m not entirely sure why.

06. “The Chinago” – Now it’s no surprise that I enjoy China-themed stories and books, but this one threw me. I really couldn’t figure out what was going on with these Chinese workers accused of murder. Silly that someone could be mistakenly executed all because of a mispronounced name…but it was 1911, so who knows?

07. “Make Westing” – With this story, London takes his first venture of the collection into the dangerous High Seas, and he does so with a godless hero, a captain trying to round the Cape of Good Hope, cursing God all the way. He commits what some might view as a negligent act, while others would call it sheer murder, leaving behind a man fallen overboard. The wicked captain escapes justice and, since he challenged God in the moment, figures he’s beaten God in a battle of wits. And he tells Him so! And that’s how it ends. It was a terrible story, but as a Bible-believing Christian, I’d have to wonder how that fictional captain would feel right now, were he a real and living soul.

08. “Semper Idem” – This is one of the stranger stories of the lot, about an attempted suicide. The doctor saves the intended victim, only to give him advice in how the victim could have ensured his demise. Shortly after the patient’s release, he attempts suicide again, this time using the good doctor’s recommendations, and he succeeds. And the doctor is proud. “Neatness in dispatch,” Dr. Bicknell comments. It’s really quite a terrible story, and one that should be added to London’s relatively long list of suicide-themed plots. Whether the man killed himself or not, he certainly had the idea in mind during much of his writing career.

09.”A Nose for the King” – I had to listen to this story twice to make certain that I understood its plot. A man condemned to death asks for leave to say goodbye to family, but he uses that time to make deals with the king, the guard, and others in exacting from them all the money he owed for his own release. Thus, he shrewdly earns his freedom at the expense of simply a nose. An interesting idea.

10. “The Francis Speight” – This high-seas story initially struck me as another crewman-fights-the-captain yarn, but boy did it turn fast! The story actually records the half-true story of the attempted cannibalization of a young crewman aboard a ship sailing on the edges of starvation. It reminded me a bit Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, my favorite poem of all time. Yet it also reminded me of Alive and The History of the Donner Party! Not a story for the queasy-tummied or faint-hearted, the tale describes not only who the crew should kill, but also who should do the killing, and how the dispatch should be achieved. Once we find out that the murder-for-food occurs only minutes before their rescue, one would have to wonder what sort of meditations Jack London had. “A villainous imagination,” if I’ve ever seen one (thank you, Steven Page).

11. “A Curious Fragment” – This was probably the weirdest of all stories in this collection. It’s ostensibly an historical piece, written about 300 hundred years after the story itself, which occurred in what used to be Arizona, 2734. Tom Dixon, a slave under Roger (Vange) Vanderwater in Kingsbury (Alabama), is the hero in an old story about the Vange clan’s rise to prominence. The masters at the time could read, but the toilers themselves were illiterate, and thus they only spoke their stories, and through these they learned and lived in their inhibited way. The story we hear, then, is about poor Tom Dixon who loses his arm in a farming accident, and whose arm is then subjugated for the cause as a prop—holding a literate letter demanding the proper treatment of slaves from henceforth. This story was absolutely not my favorite, and it’s one that likely hasn’t aged well. I’m not surprised.

12. “A Piece of Steak” – I actually began my readings with this story, and it ultimately proved to be my favorite. It contains the timeless theme of Youth v. Experience, all in the context of early 20th-century boxing. Definitely, this story was an age piece, but it’s one that gives us an honest portrayal of life in those years. It’s nothing sugarcoated, like The Great Gatsby, but an honest description of what life must have been like for immigrants and Americans alike in days when a simple bite of steak meant life or death, victory or defeat, survival or starvation. We hold no camaraderie with someone like Tom King, but we can understand the thought-processes of this 40-year-old boxer at the tail end of his career with a hungry wife and kids sitting at home. He longs for so little, merely a bite of steak, before he fights the young Sandal, a bite that would provide him with the strength to win and earn the purse that will eventually help him pay his rent and feed his family. King recalls his own youth, when he could beat the older fighters as if he had something greater than they, but now here he is fighting that eternal train of youth himself, and he realizes what those old fighters must have been facing when they entered the ring and lost. In fact, he recalls an old fighter crying in the locker room following one fight, and he never understood why. Until now.

I enjoyed my visit back to London’s world a century ago, and I think you will too. He wrote many a short story, so if none of these ring your bell, some of his others might—try The Red One (1918).

©2020 E.T.

Read More from Jack London:

• The Call of the Wild (1903)
• The Game (1905)
• Before Adam (1906)
• The Road (1907)
• When God Laughs (1911)
• The Human Drift (1917)
• Love of Life and Other Stories (1907)
• The Red One (1918)
• Stories of the North (1965)