Review: Very readable short stories with a bit of social commentary
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 24, 2013
The author prefaced his collection of short stories with an autobiographical piece that described his descent from a typical teenager with promise of a bright future to a disillusioned cog in a big corporate machine, followed by a life of alcohol, psychiatric medications, and thoughts of suicide. It's a bleak portrait of a young man who has lost all hope and sees life as pointless. Then a text message not even intended for him gave him some hope for the future, and as others in this position have often done, he turned to writing as a way out of the crippling depression that gripped him. The result was the stories in this book, which combine fiction with some subtle social commentary. I didn't always agree with the author's outlook, but he expressed himself very eloquently in his collection of original short stories.The stories are a mixed bag, but I enjoyed each of them, some more than others, but they all demonstrated a considerable writing talent by the young first-time author. My favorite story was "In Defense," which began humorously enough, but as one man quickly learned, his neighbors in the homeowners association were deadly serious about maintaining their property values. "Model Citizen" was a cautionary tale about the direction our society is headed in, with one possible bizarre outcome. In "Last Words," a man who believes that he has been wronged by the corporate giant he works for chooses an extreme path of retribution, ending in a violent, gruesome climax. "An All Too Human Selection" was about life in a not-too-distant future when it's possible to predict the appearance of an unborn baby when it becomes eighteen years old. But what happens if the results don't meet society's expectations of beauty?It's easy to fear for the future of the short story, but authors like Julien Haller give me hope that the art of the short story is still very much alive.The author provided a copy of the book for review purposes.