Review: Fantastic mindbender.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 30, 2012
The previous short story I tried of Scribner's (Familiar Faces) fell short of it's potential.  But the building blocks were there, so I tried another to see if it better satisfied the promise shown.Tortured Spirit more than fulfilled that promise.  While our protagonist is used to waking up in strange places, a sealed room resembling a hospital cafeteria with four other young women and one older one is beyond even her usual level of weirdness.  But things will get stranger, and scarier, still.Scribner's prose here wonderfully creates an atmosphere of unease and tension, allowing us to follow with the emotions of the characters.  He achieves the full effect of horrific events without having to go into full "horror" style descriptions and maintains exactly the right level of suspense.  Tortured Spirit is a perfectly paced and fully developed short story that is exactly as long as it needs to be.Highly recommended.