Review: Don't Ever Change
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 20, 2011
When I saw the title of this short story, I thought maybe it was a romance since that would fit.  It could be about a lot of things, but until I read the description, I never guessed it would be a horror story, but it is horror with a capital H.It's high school graduation time and Lori is signing a yearbook for Adam, a student she vaguely knows.  She doesn't quite know what to say, so she writes a kind of generic note to him in his yearbook. Adam doesn't have any friends, and the other students just don't seem to pay much attention to him, and Adam doesn't go out of his way to make friends with them, either.It is twenty-three years later and Lori is returning home for her mother's funeral, but she is hesitant to go straight to her old house because her father is a wreck and she doesn't want to face him right away.  Lori drives around her New Mexico home town, and finds herself on the street where her high school still stands.  Disappointed, she sees that the school is surrounded by a fence with barbed wire atop it and there is also a metal detector near the door.  There is also a guard booth.  Since it is spring break, there is no one at the school that she can see.Lori would love to take a peek in the windows of the school to see if anything has changed.  She parks the car and walks along the chain link fence and comes to a place in the fence where someone has cut a space big enough for an adult to get through onto the school grounds. Lori goes through and starts looking in the school windows.  She will be sorry that she did.This story is one that is very suspenseful and tense, and I didn't know which way the ending was going to go,so it kept me on the edge of my seat until I read what happened. It's a well-crafted story and it's very creative.I really enjoyed this one quite a bit and wouldn't hesitate to read more of John H. Carroll's stories.