A review by johndiconsiglio
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Pandemic classics continue with these 3 short novels. (Porter wouldn’t say “novella.”) The 1939 titular story is about doomed lovers during the Great Influenza. It’s autobiographical—although she claimed to hate writers whose fiction was “a thinly disguised personal confession which better belongs to the psychoanalyst’s séance.” As a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Porter nearly died of influenza while romancing a young soldier. She claimed she wrote her stories in one sitting. (We should all be so blessed!) She’s fallen out of style, but you can hear her storytelling influence in Southern writers from Eudora Welty to Flannery O’Connor.