It’s kinda like urban fantasy, but the characters aren’t teenagers and they all work nine-to-fives inside a honeycomb of cubicles. Doesn’t sound familiar? Let me jog your memory.

Short stories are the overlooked stepchild of the literary world. They’re the sluggish tales you hated reading in English class. They’re the training ground for newer writers not yet “good enough” to write novels. The mainstream consensus is, they’re cute. Oh, you wrote a short story? That’s cute.

The lone gunslinger might be more historical fiction than fact, but there’s a cultural longing for what he or she represents, one that didn’t die with the genre’s popularity.

Perhaps we prefer anti-heroes because we have fallen so short of their nobler literary ancestors. We enjoy characters that mirror ourselves, maybe our darkest fantasies or alter-egos, because they demand less of us.