Review: Well Written Facing End of Civilization Short Story
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 5, 2012
I downloaded this ages ago but put off reading it as I read another short story called Vermin by this author, that one carried a lot of hype and didn't live up to it, or even match the descriptions of what the story was about in a lot of early customer reviews.  If there's ever an example of a hit miss author, Allison M Dickson is that. Dust is, for a simple two word description, simply brilliant! It is a short story, that read like one should. Many of these Kindle cheap/free short stories seem to be good ideas that could be fleshed out more to be longer and even benefit from doing so. Dust is the appropriate length (a twenty minute or so read if you're wondering on length).  Padding it out would be unnecessary and I think actually lessen the impact of this sad narrator's tale. We learn why he has a panic room in the first place and what happened to the world (and why this story is called Dust) through his recount of the world's and particularly the US events over the previous couple of years.  It's a good tale, end of humanity stories should be somewhat believable to work, and this one, well you never know, it could happen!