Review: A great little short story
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 16, 2011
The year is 2024, the unemployment rate is 20% and the U.S. is in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Serious rioting is going on in the cities, and a group named RadicalX is claiming responsibility for pipe bombs in mail boxes and other nasty deeds. The U.S. and China are getting closer to nuclear war with each other.Kevin Husby has lost his job and sits in Central Park on a beautiful late summer day.  On this day he notices a very tall man dressed in a tuxedo and top hat playing in the fountain with the children, splashing and just having fun.  When he gets out of the fountain, the tall man named Tommy goes to see two elderly men who look kind of sad. He does some magic tricks and they cheer up. Kevin is very surprised that when people offer Tommy money, he refuses to take it, and having been a street performer earlier in his own life, Kevin just doesn't understand why Tommy won't take the generous amounts that people offer him.Tommy looks like a Native American, but he doesn't talk much other than to say that he performs his magic tricks to "make people forget." Kevin wants to start a new life on the west coast as well as a new business, and he and Tommy Top Hat, as he later is nicknamed, start out in an old car that Kevin buys used.  Kevin becomes the money manager and Tommy finally agrees that Kevin can take the money and save it for their business.  While the two spend time together, Kevin notices that Tommy never eats and he never sleeps.  He only wants to "Make people forget."  He is a very strange man and seems to be something other than human.I won't give any more details so as not to give away too much of the story.  This is a very well written story and the author has written other short stories in addition to a novel and has another coming out in 2012.  This isn't a horror story and there are no monsters.  I thoroughly enjoyed this short story and it took about ten or fifteen minutes to read it.  It's well worth reading and worth discovering the author if you haven't read anything by him yet.  I'd like to read more by Scott William Carter since I enjoyed this so much.  Tommy Top Hat is a story with meaning and I think anyone would enjoy it.