Review: To Be Continued...
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 6, 2014
I am a big fan of Adam and Evans Light, two of the best short horror fiction writers on Amazon. One of the things I admire most about them is their willingness to take chances and experiment with various subgenres within the broad field of horror. Couple their desire for experimentation with the exacting demands a short story places on a writer, and there are bound to be missteps. "The Continuance Agency," by Adam Light, is a longish story that can best be compared to a near miss gymnastics routine. The form is great for the most part, but he fails to stick the landing."Agency" is an end-of-the-world tale in which most of civilization is wiped out, seemingly overnight, by something or some things that reside in low lying dark clouds that seem to cover the entire earth. From time to time, ghostly figures emerge from the cloud and pounce upon anyone happening to be in their way. Of course, as time goes on, there are fewer and fewer people left for the cloud creatures to pounce upon. One such survivor is Daniel, a young college grad still living at home when his parents and fiancée are killed by the cloud and its denizens. As his food supply dwindles and his despair grows, Daniel receives a message from a representative of the titular agency requesting he go to their downtown headquarters and join other survivors in an effort to begin repopulating the world.Adam Light does a lot of things right in "Agency." His depiction of the horrors in the clouds and what happens to Daniel's family are quite chilling, and he summarizes Daniel's survival tactics and his mounting despair succinctly and plausibly. Finally, Light describes the Agency headquarters itself as somewhat of a bizarre fantasy laboratory that seems like an offshoot of a "Stepford Wives"-type experiment. The farther Daniel progresses in his tour of the Agency headquarters, the greater the reader's feeling (though not necessarily Daniel's feeling) that things are definitely not all right here.A story like "Continuance Agency" builds suspense so that readers await and expect a powerful ending. And that's exactly what they get, an ending that comes as a jolt. Unfortunately, it also comes as a big disappointment for readers, who, it is safe to say, were probably expecting something completely different. It's difficult for me to explain why the ending disappoints without spoiling it, which I definitely won't do, but I can say that readers will probably feel the same way visitors to P.T. Barnum's museum felt when they went to visit the egress and found themselves outside the museum... somehow cheated. It's not the fact that the ending surprises readers; it's the type of surprise that will doubtless be a disappointment for many people, myself included.Adam Light is too talented a writer, and he does too many things well in this story, for his ending to have been a result of inexperience or sloppiness. He meant to end the story in a very high risk manner that may work for some readers. For me, it didn't. The story is still a decent story, with a number of good descriptive sequences along the way, but the ending drains a lot of the story's impact.