reviews

Apocalypse, Dystopia, and the Love of a Mother Author: Louise Erdrich With the eerie haziness of The Handmaid’s Tale, Future Home of the Living God explores the rapid devolution from normal into dystopian crises through the eyes of a disturbed pregnant woman. Cedar Hawk Songmaker starts the narrative, journaling to her as yet unborn child as she watches the world around her rescind and reform. Evolution is reversing itself – no one knows why – and contemporary species are rapidly reverting to their primordial forms. Humans are no exception and more and more, babies born exhibit some incomplete genetic makeup [...]

If Slavery In America Was Legal Today . . . Author: Ben H. Winters It’s a modern alternate America – Lincoln was assassinated, the Civil war never happened, and a compromise between north and south has allowed slavery to exist, protected in the “Hard Four” – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and a unified Carolina. The rest of the states self-righteously follow the “Clean Hands” law, refusing to purchase goods made from slave labor. Yet the industry continues, grows, thrives. The Hard Four is pitted with plantations that function as efficiently secured industry towns, high-tech observance commingled with primitive brainwashing and brutal [...]

Gillian Flynn, Serial Child Murders, and Psychosis Author: Gillian Flynn Camille Preaker’s past is a harsh patchwork of sharp-edged lies and half buried memories. Unstable and released after a hush-hush venture in the psychiatric ward which only her boss and his kindly wife know about, Camille is now a barely functional neurotic with veins of suicidal depression. Enter her next work assignment with a mid-grade no-name newspaper which will take her back to confront her home-town family demons while following-up on a grisly string of child murders. In true “A Rose for Emily” style, we encounter a sleepy little southern [...]