Flash fiction is short, funny and allowed only so much pathos before the word count is up. Like a stand-up comic graduating from an hour-long show to an eight-minute set on a late night talk show, flash fiction is a ceremonious demotion to professional writing. Readers of flash fiction are demanding, overly critical, and of course, are only humbly asking to be entertained.

East Of The Web is a popular British website featuring up and coming new authors from the United Kingdom, or perhaps anywhere in the world who can keep up with the meticulous English-style writing. It has received honorable mention from magazines and Internet sites such as Yahoo, USA Today and Britannica. One of the site's most popular flash fiction entries this month, complete with E-cover and multiple reader reviews, is Iain Grant's Maggot And Misogyny.

The flash fiction piece follows a writer in the creative process, coming to terms with his ideas, his true motivation, and ironically, his own inner-critic?which not so subtly typifies his mainstream readership. The writer begins with an idea; will it be a tale of a maggot or a misogynistic man's lost love? Before he can even complete a sentence, his inner critic corrects him?not necessarily with a productive suggestion, merely a shallow criticism. "No one in their right mind would condone violence towards women," the writer's critic explains to which he agrees and changes the thought before a direction can be explored.

Maggot And Misogyny is less a humorous piece than it is a quirky depiction of a writer's inner rage. The word play between the writer and the critic is not only funny but also eloquent and lyrical. The word maggot is used affectionately and like a recurring C chord throughout this composition of literary pressure. There are several funny lines throughout the book and a few of those lines the writer actually finishes, not conforming to the critic's wishes and going with his gut instinct. The story not only achieves a high level of comedy and romantic angst, but also delivers a fatal jarwal-like bite to all pseudo-intellectual literary critics.

This self-conscious, possum-like defense, however, will not spare Grant from what he fears the most: that is, criticism. By the end of the story, he has retreated not only from his inner critic (choosing to invite his demanding Jiminy Cricket to a pub instead of finishing the story) but also from his readers who were expecting some sort of guttural affirmation to happen by the final smirking words. If the story was about the challenge of the writer overcoming literary criticism, then did the ending of the story illustrate the futility of writing a story to please the masses? If so, we were left with a maggot in our ear. The ending of the piece is too light and abrupt to teach us anything besides that the writer lost this battle and will presumably live to write another day.

But we'll give the delightfully funny Iain Grant the benefit of the doubt. Flash fiction is the literary world's eight-minute stand-up routine. Over-rehearsed, over-scrutinized and limited in capacity to what it can accomplish before they pull the mike. Grant and his misogynistic maggot did make this talk show host laugh. I would look forward to reviewing a full-length work and finding his answers to the questions that eat away at all our heads. Grade: B