Rating: 3.5* of five
My latest review, WANTED: ELEVATOR MAN by Joseph G. Peterson, is live today at Entropy Magazine. Thanks, Switchgrass Books of Northern Illinois University Press, for sending me the review copy!
Perhaps the most representative quote is also the centerpiece of the story:
He felt entombed and stifled and desperately craved oxygen. He vainly raised the question: Why have you forsaken me?
'Call my mother,' he yelled. He had meant to say: I'm dying. Please call a priest.
The shadowy Presence, who had been in a panic, rushed over to him and, disregarding the fact that it was live, pushed the cable aside.
'You're alive,' the Presence said in breathless tones. 'Mamma's here to help.'
The elevator continued to descend, creating a vacuum. Barnes gasped for breath.
'Breathe in, breathe out,' the Presence urged. She tapped his pulse rapidly with two fingers. 'Come on, you can do it. One, two, three. Breathe in. Mamma's here to help.' ... In his delirium he thought that indeed his mother was here to help. However, in all of Barnes's twenty-nine years of so-called living, his mother had never come so comfortingly close as this.
This is quality reading. Seek it out.
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