Review: How Many Ways Can You Be Trapped?
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 15, 2013
Five degrees of short stories.Three of these stories feature a woman who's trapped in some way. "Thank You For Calling" features a woman who's economically trapped, working for a call center, taking calls from lonely people who need a friendly ear. She wants a regular, day job, so she can see her husband. This is an excellent job of expressing boredom in a character without creating it in the reader. In "The Last Six Miles" a woman is battling to complete a marathon, after being trapped by depression and in a fat body. I really felt like I was in her running shoes, and "got," a little bit, WHY those crazy runners do that to themselves. In "She Floats," she wakes up, surrounded by water in an aquarium, with twenty minutes of air left, someone observing her, and seemingly, no way out.The other two stories are vastly different, though they also echo a theme of a character being trapped."The Event" is set in a dystopian future, where young males are armed and sent out (don't remember if it's once a month, or once a year) to shoot and kill any elderly people they can find, those who haven't already done society the favor of swallowing a cyanide pill. Raises some interesting questions about peer/societal pressures, and what it can and can't make people do.In "Fourth Degree Freedom," a post-nuclear-war future, some fetuses carry mutations which turn them into literal monsters, with sharp teeth, claws, and fur. Most prospective parents choose to abort, but for those who don't - what do you do with the monster in the basement? And how will your normal children, if any, interact with their monster sibs?I really liked all these stories, though "Fourth Degree" was my favorite. At 99 cents for the set, it's a very fair price.