Review: Nine very short and very witty stories with unexpected clever endings
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 16, 2011
This free kindle book contains nine very short stories by Joshua Scribner. Each is unusual and supernatural, and each has a really clever and unexpected humorous ending. The first, "Wish Limit," is about a poor beer-drinking fisherman who catches a strange looking fish who promises to grant him one wish if he will throw it back into the water. The fish explains that it can only grant a wish that does not go against the man's preordained destiny. The second "Portals" tells of a woman who is visited one day by people who were dead who come to her through something associated with their prior life, such as a baker appearing in an oven. The third is "The Depths." Two spirits arrive at the bed of a man whose family is about to pull the plug on him and let him die. They are waiting for him to die so they can take his soul to hell. The fourth, "Donation," is about a donation delivered to a man who ran a horror program on his computer. Who sent him $30,000? The fifth, "Transformation," concerns some things that had become human, which weren't human before. What were they? The sixth is "Older Women." It examines why a certain man is repulsed by young women while being uncontrollably attracted to older women.  The seventh, "Flow," looks at how one action may unexpectantly affect another. The eighth is "A little Urine" about a woman shooting a pellet into a dog's leg, but it wasn't a dog. The last is called "The Next Monster": a writer not only thinks about the monsters he will write about, they appear to him.