There's a continuum, though, isn't there? I mean, on the one side you have, like, "Pilgrim's Progress" and Ayn Rand, all message and minimal story filled with flat characters, and on the other end you have, I dunno, "Snakes on a Plane" or something, that has nothing but events without purpose or meaning. (Barring some sort of post-modern deconstructionist non-story.) Where is the line between a message story and a regular story?
There may be a continuum, sure. Again, these reviews were just my opinions. In my view, the bottom of that continuum is something like "He's Alive!" or "Let that be your Last Battlefield." I think "Set Down This," "The Undoing," "Wave Goodbye" and "The Sultan of Meat" fell well below this threshold.
Take "Wave Goodbye," which I personally thought was a little on the preachy side; it's got a lot of characterization and some modulated notes that give it a nuance of flavor. It doesn't only have a "message," since part of the story revolves around the tension between the vengeful ghost and her restless daughter, and that means it has characters and a conflict. Heck, not everyone even got the same message from that story; some people thought it was an endorsement of the ghost's worldview, but others saw it as an indictment of that same drive to vengeance. If it does have only a message and nothing else, then it's not doing a good job conveying it.
Perhaps to you. But I saw precisely zero tension in the story. The daughter never really had any power or ability to stop the mother, so there was never any tension that they might come to legitimate conflict. Meanwhile, the victim was drawn in completely card-board style and whatever her side of the story was, it was totally ignored. The fact that she had friends, family and maybe a boyfriend or lover who would miss her was not even considered. Making her a human being who was legitimately suffering would have made the story appear nuanced and not so thuroughly on the side of the ghost. Again, this is my opinion. This story worked for some, and I can see why it did and why Ben chose it, but it failed for me.
Or "Sultan of Meat," which was also about striking images and rich, chewy language as much as whatever message one can see in it. (I agree that its fundamental premise appeared to be that the universe is a cruel place, but I don't really see that conveying that message was in any way the point of the story. If anything, you needed to already have digested that meme in order to even understand the story; if you weren't familiar with the idea of a cold cruel universe, then God as a masochistic devoured devourer would be utter nonsense to you.) It was also about a girl's self-destruction and a man failing to save her from it, and it was also about some truly horrific imagery. I don't think one can really pull a single clear and obvious meaning from that story, let alone claim that there wasn't anything else in it.
I don't think one can pull a single, clear
plot from that story either. Because it was so plotless, the only things it really did were (a) have lots of metaphor and (b) have some sort of message. Even if (b) is not true, it doesn't really matter. Without message or plot, my criticism still stands: it's a meandering mess of metaphor (hah! Unintentional alliteration!). Again, that's just my opinion and others may have felt differently, but I have yet to see anyone (including you) accurately summarize the plot of that one and declare it gripping.
More broadly, all stories have messages; theme is an integral part of a story structure, and you can't avoid having your story say something. Even saying nothing is saying something; refraining from making a particular thematic statement is itself a thematic statement. Stories can also have themes they didn't intend and convey messages they weren't meant to convey. Sometimes this reveals some sort of hidden bias on the part of the author, but other times it's just a matter of the catalytic interface between the text and the reader. Witness the whole #racefail debacle from last year; a lot of people heard a message that wasn't supposed to be sent and whose author was unaware of its existence until others pointed it out. How loud a given message is tends to be a factor as much of the reader as the author.
Hmmm. I'm not familiar with #racefail. I agree that a story will have a theme and that it is simply unavoidable. But what I have been striving to point out is that theme and even message is okay, so long as it takes a back seat to the plot. Again, just my opinion, but a story like "The Undoing" has virtually no plot. It can be summarized as "criminal gets tortured." When the plot is so thin, the message is all the louder. Eventually, at some point, the message becomes the focus and that, to me, is something I dislike. A story like "Set Down This" reads to me like the author came up with the message first and the story second (this may or may not be true, of course, it's just how it reads to me). A story with an "unintentional" message likely contains that message precisely because the story was written first.
There probably is a point where something stops being a story and becomes simply a manifesto. (I'd argue Ayn Rand is at least in danger of slipping off that precipice, for instance.) I don't think it's a good approach, however, to reduce a story to a one-sentence theme (one of several possible readings) and then denounce that story for being only that theme; it wasn't only that theme until you reduced it to that, d'you see? It had characters and a plot and stuff, or else it wouldn't have been a story at all.
This is precisely where you and I part company. What I disagree with you most about is that "[the story] had characters and a plot and stuff." The big 4 I have decided to call "message stories" ("Set Down This," "Wave Goodbye," "The Sultan of Meat" and "The Undoing") I regard as virtually plotless with thinly drawn caritcatures of characters. You do not see them that way and regard them as full-fledged stories. I don't. Because I don't, all I can see is the message. I may or may not have misinterpreted the message, but that is irrelevant. It's the plotlessness and thin characters that bug me far more than the fact that the story had something to say. Others may disagree. Some may be enchanted by nuance and subtlety, and I can see where that might be in those stories. But, obviously, I am not one for subtlety. I prefer the powerful action, imagery and legitimate fear of a story like "The Worm that Gnaws" to whatever "negative space" can be found in "Set Down this."
Again: just my opinion. I totally understand why some people liked "Set Down This." I understand why you liked it. I get why Ben liked it and why he chose it. I don't think he's stupid for choosing it or anything. It was a wise decision. If he simply picked stories that were appealing to me personally, we'd all get bored really quickly. If I can see where you liked a story, but disagree, can you see where I might dislike a story?