Review: Eat or be eaten
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2014
Wolverton Station reads like an episode of Twilight Zone; a lone businessman travelling on a train suddenly begins seeing wolves everywhere. And that's about all the plot there is in this short story by Joe Hill, but hey, if the writing's good, that's enough.And the writing's stellar. Hill puts the main character, Saunders, from one unpleasant situation to another with glee, first giving him a glimpse of a fellow first class passenger (a businesswolf!) and then locking him in a train toilet in a feeble attempt to hide from the plebeian wolves in the economy class.It may all be a dream, or a result of a nervous breakdown; there's a lot of background on Saunders, a ruthless businessman on a mission to establish a chain of Starbucks-style coffee shops around Britain (mostly by forcing existing shops out). As he's already living on a eat-or-be-eaten philosophy, it's not much of a leap for it to become a literal reality for him.Originally published in an anthology in 2011, Wolverton Station is a fine, fast, fun read; it's not really much else, nor does need to be.