The Novella Is A Peculiar Beast

Doors Open by Ian Rankin reviewed by author John Connolly.

"The novella is a peculiar beast. To play devil's advocate, it lacks both the succinctness of the short story and the scope of the novel, and often seems to provide a kind of halfway house for ideas that are too involved for the former, but too thin for the latter.

It also seems that the finest novellas eventually tend to be adopted by the larger family of the novel.

Do we really think of The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, Heart of Darkness or The Outsider as novellas?"

Rankin's novella was originally published in serialized form in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.