One guy in Russia suddenly goes crazy. He first attacks his friend, then he kills himself. A few more people engage in similar behavior. By the time there’s about 300 unexplained suicides worldwide, society shuts down. This didn’t ring true to me. As I write this, over half a million people have died from Covid-19, yet there’s still a sizable chunk of the population who refuse to wear masks. Why would everybody panic after just 300 deaths worldwide? We humans generally don’t take things seriously until it’s too late. Continue reading →

“If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns. There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.”

Zone One is a literary novel and as such is more focused on poetic language than action. The prose is filled with metaphors, similes, foreshadowing, personification, thesaurus words, and pages of description. So even though it’s a zombie book, it’s one your English teacher will be proud of you for reading. Continue reading →

Dark Corners is a collection of horror short stories published by Amazon, which I’d say is worth your time overall.

“There’s a Giant Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed” by Edgar Cantero takes place in a world in which anything you say becomes reality. It’s both fun and funny and also has a couple scary moments. Four children who are all Harry Potter fans (and who each belong to a different Harry Potter house) are having a sleepover when the ability to summon monsters like giant trapdoor spiders into existence becomes a problem. Continue reading →

This collection of speculative fiction was published in order to support the refugee and immigrant center RAICES. In the introduction, the editor compares the treatment of present-day South American refugees to the way Jews were treated during World War II, which is an apt comparison. After all, FDR turned away thousands of Jewish refugees and sent them back to Germany due to fear that they would threaten national security. Many of them ended up dying in the Holocaust. Unfortunately, history is repeating itself due to the anti-immigrant sentiment of Americans today. Organizations like RAICES need all the help they can get. Continue reading →

In The Down Days, a laughter epidemic (similar to the real-life Tanganyika laughter epidemic) infects Cape Town, South Africa and the name of the city gets changed to Sick City. It’s forbidden to laugh in public and people are required to get tested daily for the disease. Due to everyone wearing masks all the time, lips become fetishized and giggle porn becomes a thing. The laughter disease is largely off-screen for most of the book, which was a bit disappointing. There should have been a scene early on featuring someone cracking up in public. Continue reading →

Warmer is a collection of short stories published by Amazon concerning climate change. I haven’t read any of these authors before, but I’ve liked other Amazon collections, so I thought I’d give it a try. Some are literary stories taking place in the present, while others are sci-fi stories taking place in the future. Continue reading →

“If you were a diabetic and you didn’t have money for a hit of insulin, would you steal to get the money? Or just die?”

A Scanner Darkly is one of my favorite movies, so I thought it was time I read the book. It’s about a futuristic drug called Substance D that either kills people or permanently destroys their brains after a while, but because it’s addictive, users keep using it anyway. Philip K. Dick himself was damaged by drug addiction and bases some of the characters on friends of his, some of whom died due to drug use, so he knows what he’s writing about. Continue reading →