On "A Maze of Death" by Philip K. Dick **

This is not one of Dick's stronger books. More an allegory than a novel, the characters largely serve the plot and the themes. As such, many of their actions are pretty much nonsensical, as their personalities turn radically from page to page in order to aid in the novel's twists and surprises. This is something Dick has shown a tendency to do in other books I've read, but here it is at its full splendor, if one wishes to call it such.

The particular allegory here has to do with the life we lead and the religion we live by. Why are we here? is the big question of the book. It's posed by the fourteen people who end up alone on planet. They're there to start for a project--perhaps to forge a colony, perhaps to explore the planet, perhaps something else entirely--but none of them, it appears, have any particularly useful skill sets. One's an economist. One's a psychologist. In other words, these are a group of white-collar workers with no skills worthy the hands-on projects they'll need to complete to survive.

A problem arises soon after they arrive, however. The true mission of their trip to this planet is bound up in a satellite transmission that, midway through its message, goes bad. "Your purpose is" ends with three dots on the end that will never see a finale. To make matters worse, they've arrived on one-way transport vehicles, so they can't get off the planet. Without a means to communicate and without a means to leave, they now have to make do as a colony of misfits.

The "death" part of the title doesn't take long to arrive. The planet features various small, man-made creatures--bugs that take photos, forts that scrabble around like mice. Some of these might not have the colonists best interests at heart. Some of the colonists die, and it doesn't take long for the rest of them to turn on one another.

There's an interesting twist that comes later in the book that at least partially redeems it and partially explains the silliness of the characters, but that's not something I'll reveal here, even though I'm not sure I felt like the hundred-plus pages leading to it makes the reading worth it. Suffice to say, much is not as it seems.

On "Mount Stromboli" by John Matthew Fox (2156 words) ***

The beautiful thing about this story is the way that Fox focuses on the various senses. There are smells, feelings of touch, and sights. This piece is awash with great verbs. We're encased not just in a mundane recounting of events but in a place itself, in the skin of this girl is hiking with her father. The attention to senses makes sense, for the girl's father is a painter, and she too is studying artwork. But there's a worry, the girl has, that so much study will ruin art for her. Her father, she notes, has an understanding of what goes into art, but she senses that he no longer feels art, no longer takes wonder in it. While the girl's sense of wonder may be intact, the father's understanding of technique is what ultimately proves to be salvation--a salvation that leads to some beautiful (wonderful) last lines. Read the story here at the Adirondack Review.

On "Understanding Philip K. Dick" by Eric Carl Link ****

This is the first book from University of South Carolina Press's "Understanding" that I have read, and if this book is anything like the others, I'm going to have to read some more. The book is a very short introduction to Dick's life and work, discussing his biography and major themes and giving closer readings of a few select works.

The biography I was very aware of by now, having read two books about Dick's life. But it was nice to have someone summarize it so well. Likewise, having now read six of Dick's novels and a small assortment of his stories, I'm familiar with most of his major themes and motifs, but having someone write those out for me--and explore what those things really mean--was satisfying as well. Having left off the academic study of literature fifteen years ago now, I don't tend to read as closely or as methodically as I used to, and I felt a bit silly not to have picked up on some of what now seems very obvious in some of the works that Dick has written. Most specifically, Link linked some of the reading in Jung, Binswanger, and the I Ching that I've done in a concrete fashion, something I'd been too lazy to think through thoroughly myself.

Of central concern to Dick is the ability to know--or to know transcendence--as Link puts it in hs book's conclusion. This is, of course, where he connects up with many of the concerns of the gnostics. And it also links to his concerns about the nature of reality and of the self--for if we can't know who or what "god" is, then how can we even know the world around us or within us? Or as Link puts it in his chapter on themes, Dick essentially sets out to know two thing: What is real and what is human? If some kind of transcendent existence is real, how do or can we know? Isn't it just as possible that such experiences are the workings of a madman's mind? Or are the mad the ones who truly understand the world (as in the case of the schizophrenics who populate many of Dick's works and who figure in Jung's own work)? For humanness, Dick posits his concept of empathy--it is our ability to feel with others that makes us human. However, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, even this can be problematized.

Other themes of Dick's work, to give a short list, include: what is real, what is the self, what is human, the nature of power, the effects of technology and media, the effects of drugs, and what is madness. One of the most interesting readings of a Dick novel, I think, was Link's critique of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. He sees the work as largely one about love--or different messed-up forms of love. He attaches Dick's biography to this, as it was written during the breakup of Dick's fourth marriage. The novel itself details various forms of betrayal amid love, including the incestuous brother/sister-man/wife relationship at much of the novel's core and the love of one's child (in the form of that family's own child). Indeed, Jason Taverner, who I see as more the focus of the book, loses his identity largely through an act of betrayal: his betraying of his friend with another woman, the other woman's vengeful act in return for Taverner's dumping of her, and his friend's betrayal in the form of her own affair.

Having read this book, I certainly came away having felt like I knew Dick's work even better than before.

On "On the Surface" by Barron T. Byrnes (1295 words) ****

Split a story into fragments and make the reader reconstruct it. It's a strategy I found really exciting during my college years, but I've strayed farther away from such words as I've gotten older, falling more for straight stories. Byrnes's piece, however, is a throwback to that earlier fascination of mine. The story isn't so much one of a straight plot, therefore, but an accumulation of motifs and images--oceans, beaches, death, funerals, bodies, love. How do these all come together? Well, it's up to the reader to put the pieces of the puzzle in place. This one's worth a second read, here, at Super Arrow.

On "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K. Dick *****

I enjoyed this novel of Dick's more than any of the previous one's I've read. Here are some reasons I think this might be so: (1) I saw the movie and liked it first; (2) it's more like a regular book than a sci-fi novel; or (3) it's about drugs and includes some cool plot devices.

The movie, directed by Richard Linklater, is an animated feature--or really, it's a live action theater that has been traced over with ink. Such seems appropriate in a way for the trippy subject matter. Starring Woody Harrelson, Keanu Reeves, Wynona Ryder, and Robert Downy Jr., the piece had no shortage of big names attached to it. Downy was the highlight of the film to me, and his character James Barris is a highlight of the book as well--extremely funny. Would he have been as funny in the book if I hadn't seen Downy's portrayal first? I don't know. Unlike many a film adaptation, this one actually seems to have followed the book fairly closely, so I've been hard pressed to say whether I actually like one more than the other. I can't even say they're that different, other than the fact that they are different mediums.

The tale itself has barely any tie to science fiction. The main reason it could be classified as such: a suit that police investigators wear that allows their identities to be hidden. The suit essentially changes its appearance several times a second, so you can't really describe a single person. At the time of the book, this was probably fantasy; today, it's likely possible, since it's possible now to wear a suit that would make you invisible. Cool technology.

Other than that, however, this is a book about druggies and about the police who try to catch them. But like many a noir novel, the line between the two is not very easy to see. Police engage in drug deals in order to work their way further up the drug chain; they take drugs themselves to fit into the culture. And because they work undercover and don't know their identities, many are the times when one agent is investigating the drug-related activity of what turns out to be yet another agent, who is also simply trying to find people higher up the pecking order to bust. In fact, one gets the sense that the entire system might be run by some kind of drug conglomerate.

In the middle of this is Bob Arctor (think Actor--he after is one of the police/druggie posers) or Fred or Bruce. Bob, as in the novel The Big Clock is eventually assigned the job of investigating himself. But in the process, he begins to lose his mind: Is he Bob or Fred or Bruce? Is he all three?

This gets back to a continuing theme in Dick's world--namely, that of identity. While Jason Travener, in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loses his identity completely to the world, Bob loses his identity to himself. In both works, Dick seems to be suggesting that personal identity is at the least significantly created by the society around it rather than within the individual. The individual, ungirded from that social link, is nothing. Conversely, I suppose, one could argue that Travener has an identity because he spends the novel trying to regain it. Here, in A Scanner Darkly, however, Bob/Fred/Bruce isn't working to regain any one of those identities. At his core, he doesn't know who he is, and he comes apart as a result.

On "The Crystal Ball" by A.M. Amodeo (4703 words) ***

Pearl is a worrier, and she had good reason to do so. Her husband has a back problem. Her mom has married an old man with health problems of his own. And the best job that Pearl can manage is a shift at a convenience store, not enough to raise one daughter let alone another she'd like to have and really not enough to help support her own cash-strapped mother, who they live with. But one can dream, and that is what Pearl does. "The Crystal Ball" is part of that dream, telling of a future and a way to get there that depends, it seems, on destruction. Good fortune depends on someone else's bad. Read the story here at Fried Chicken and Coffee.

On "Layers" by Kristy Webster (644 words) ***

Webster's story starts off with a bizarre premise that it wouldn't seem could possibly work. A number of shorter stories do such--catching our attention, exploring a goofy idea, and then dismissing it. Webster manages something a little different here, however, by extending the idea into a kind of metaphor.

In "Layers," Eldon is a man many times rejected who settles finally for an onion. That's right: an onion. Webster's description of the onion are what make this actually seem as sad as the situation is, and her conclusion hints at something special. Read the story here at A Fly in Amber.

On "I Am Alive and You Are Dead" by Emmanuel Carrere ****

In reading this biography, I was reminded a bit of the life of L. Ron Hubbard, another science fiction writer whose tales became eventually the reality of his life. Philip K. Dick seems to have gone similarly insane. Both were "crap artists" of a sort, though Hubbard was into the con, whereas Dick merely told tales--and took odd positions--for amusement. But in the end, they both seem to have been mentally sick gentlemen.

I had previously read the biography of Philip Dick by his third wife Anne. In that book, she comes across as a bit crazy and high strung but largely sympathetic and very much still in love with her husband. In this book, she is the subject only of a chapter or so, and she does not come off all that well at all. High strung, she pushes Dick over the edge. But then, every woman except Kleo, his second wife, seems to do that eventually. He was, it appears, a very difficult man to live with. (After all, what kind of loving man offers a dedication to his wife that also takes a swipe at her--namely, "For Anne, who stayed quiet long enough for me to write this.")

Carrere traces Dick's life from its beginnings, when Dick's sister dies in infancy, the survivor guilt from which Dick would carry throughout life and an event that would play a role in many of his novels (wherein Dick imagines one character in a dream world and the other--the dead one--in the real world). This is in part the subject of Ubik, apparently one of his best novels (unfortunately not among the books I chose for my reading list). The biographer also, as a more-distant observer than Anne, offers various critical views on Dick's work, beyond Ken in this book equals Albert in real life (as Anne was wont to do, a practice that seems somewhat dubious, since characters might be based on reality but aren't reality).

What is clear is that while philosophical ideas, psychological ideas, and religion fascinated Dick, he also liked to be a contrarian, one who simply took whatever position others weren't. And in the end, he began to believe his own crazy ravings and rants, his own books full of paranoia. Amid bad marriages, he heavily inundated himself with prescription drugs (which would allow him to write a book in two weeks). When his marriage to Anne ended, he moved on to living among a young crowd of druggies. In the midst of this, his house was robbed, and this robbery would become the focus of much of his obsession in later life: Who did it? Was it the Feds? Was it communist agents? Was it himself? He became so obsessed with such ideas that when his work found some following among Eastern Europeans, he wondered if it might not be a communist plot of some sort and started up correspondence with the FBI, which bemusedly ignored him.

Later, having given up the drug lifestyle (though not necessarily all of the drugs), Dick became even more heavily steeped in religion, such that he sometimes thought he was having visions. At some points, he claimed to believe he was a John the Baptist-type personage, announcing the coming of the One, the next prophet down the line to come from the beyond. And his books might indeed be part of this.

Carrere makes a case that at the end of Dick's life, he possibly had a change of view: toward a belief that this world, this concrete world we're in, is real. No use pretending otherwise. But because Dick was one to constantly change positions, to arouse a person's ire, there's no way of knowing how sincere he was even in this position.

On "What Will Happen" by Colin Bassett (361 words) ****

The title of Bassett's story tells us what the piece is going to meditate on. It's a piece of quiet desperation, with each line hinting at some other bigger trouble just outside the scope of the story, just "waiting to happen." And we wait. We almost begin to feel the awkwardness and trouble ourselves. Reading the story, I suppose, is kind of like working or living with someone with a personality disorder, the discomfort that that creates, how things are all right now, but you know, at any second, everything might change. Read the story here at Super Arrow.

On "Alice" by Kate Axelrod (610) words ***

A letter brings unintended consequences. That's the simple way to summarize this story. It's the unforeseen consequence at the heart of this piece that makes it so memorable, so utterly awful, so discomforting. Alice discovers she has more in common with a neighbor than she realized--is in fact perhaps better off. Read the story here at Storyglossia.

On "Hope You Get Him" by Kate Vukovich (1330 words) ***

I have had friends I liked a lot who dropped out of seeming existence. These days, it's usually easier to track said people down because of the Internet--as long as you have a full name. But I've had a few friends whose full names I never learned or who are Internet absent or whose presence on the Net consists of nothing more than perhaps a comment on a blog somewhere or a dead Friendster page. What is one to do when such friends disappear? Move on, I guess.

But Vukovich's story does something different. Here, the friend drops out--but not quite. Postcards arrive from him with short cryptic messages. There is no return address. The cryptic messages are generic. Yes, your friend is alive, they seem to say, but not much more. They beg for response, for acknowledgment--or do they? I found this piece mildly disturbing--in other words, discomforting in a subtle way that is hard to describe--perhaps because it hints not at a violence that would be shocking but at a distance that is hard to overcome. Are our words just so many communications by postcard? How well do we know those we consider to be important to us? How well do they know us? Is it even possible for us to know each other in a meaningful way? Read the story here at A Fly in Amber.

On "And It Can Never Be Too Dark or Too Bright" by Leesa Cross-Smith (1900 words) ****

Years ago, in conversation with a woman who is perhaps the closest I've ever managed to get to having a girlfriend, she asked me if it was possible to be in love with two people at once. I said I thought so, though I didn't really know from experience. What, after all, is love--or "in love"? For her, though, I could see that she was wrestling with the issue, for she "loved" two men, and I was one of them. In the end, we remained "just friends," but in the end the other guy didn't get her either.

Leesa Cross-Smith's story mines similar territory. It's a meditation on dating two men at once, on trying to sort out which is the right one--or more precisely, it's about knowing who the right one is but not being able to commit to him, because that other offers something the right one can't, because the right one isn't who you feel you deserve, because they're both in love with you, and you're in love with both.

In the midst of this, Cross-Smith does some cool stuff with geography. The places her narrator's lovers are from become their namesake. This is a means of distancing the narrator from them, of allowing her to continue see both. It's also of interest that both are from a similar region of the country--so there's sameness in the two--but from different bordering states--so there's difference. And significantly, it is in travel that the narrator finally is able to make a decision. Read the story here at Storychord.

On "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" by Philip K. Dick ****

This may rank as my favorite Philip K. Dick work so far (though I have fond memories of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which I read nearly two decades ago and thought intriguing but poorly written; I'm not so sure I'd have the same opinion now, and of course, much of my nostalgia actually comes from the movie, which is a very different animal and, actually, not as interesting in terms of theme).

Flow My Tears is an It's a Wonderful Life tale, but without the pleasant vibe. It took me a while to recognize the basic plot line as one that's been done many times before. Rather, my mind went to stories in which a character wakes up with amnesia. Here, however, the main character wakes up and knows exactly who he was the day before--only no one else knows him or remembers him, and his ID cards have been erased. Essentially, he doesn't exist.

But this isn't some tale where we learn just how many people depended on our character to survive. He doesn't, in fact, appear to have changed many people's lives at all, despite his seeming importance in the world as a pop star and variety show host. Like the empty entertainment he provides, he as a person is short on value.

Worse, he lives in a totalitarian society, a police state. Where once he was a man of privilege, he is now wanted. After all, it's illegal to go without your ID--and you can't get an ID unless you have a birth certificate, which you don't have if you don't exist. He's looking a slave labor, and so instead, he hires someone to make him some fake IDs, which proves to land him in just as much trouble.

Dick is asking big questions here--about fate (what value do we really have in the scheme of overwhelming forces?) and about identity. In the case of the latter, he seems to be suggesting that ultimately we don't control it; rather, society and circumstance forge identity for us. If we're lucky enough to host a talk-show, we're one person; if we're less fortunate, then we're likely some slave in a labor camp. The individual, in the end, isn't much value.

I've barely skimmed the surface of this text. As one would expect from pulp sci-fi, there are plenty of plot twists, and as with most of Dick's titles, there's some interest in psychological neuroses (though less than in the three previous texts I've read this year), in hallucinogenic drugs, and in altered states of reality.

If I have one complaint about the book, it's that it's actually too short. I felt like he only told half the story, then got tired of it, and chopped out a summary epilogue chapter for the ending. Until then, this text was humming along, and the questions Dick seemed to be asking were still begging us to go further down the road. I could have seen something akin to Kafka's The Trial for the second half of the book, but it wasn't to be.

On "In Thirty Minutes or It’s Free" by John Minichillo (1479 words) ***

Something about the mundanity of delivering pizza appeals to me in a story. As I recall, it was the subject of Tao Lin's first novel, and here it is again as a focus of Minichillo's wonderful short story. Cliff and Wendy are watching a movie, but the pizza they've ordered is late. They're a little irritated. Calls to the chain restaurant keep eliciting an "It's coming" response. But something wicked is working that neither Cliff nor Wendy know about, and it'll change just what this pizza means to them. Read the story here at Frigg.

On "Being-in-the-World" by Ludwig Binswanger **

Binswanger was an existential psychologist that Philip K. Dick thought highly of. In some ways, Binswanger seems very much of his time and in line with Jungian psychology, which Dick was also a fan of. But in others, Binswanger seems to depart quite a bit from Jung, at least in my reading/understanding of him.

The understanding is based in part on the substantive introduction to this book, by the translater Jacob Needleman. When I say "substantive," I mean nearly 50 percent of the pages of this text. Needleman lays Binswanger out in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. As such, the work in total felt a bit over my head. I've never been that much of a fan of pure theory, and that's much of what is on hand here.

Needleman starts with Kant and with ideas about what is "real." Is the real the exterior world of things, or is it the interior world of thoughts? Do our thoughts compose those things, or do the things compose our thoughts? Kant finds a way to meld these two ideas with his concept of understanding--that we understand the exterior, essentially, thus bringing it into the interior.

But for Binswanger, an even bigger influence is Heidegger, whose work I've never had much enthusiasm for. Thus, most of my interest went more toward Needleman's later passages when he writes of Binswanger's actual closer tie (in terms of ideas, not influence) to Sartre. Sartre claims in a way that we compose our world, our reality--but we compose it with the things that are in the external world. Essentially, we have objects, but our interpretation of those objects is what makes the world.

Within this comes Binswanger, whose interest in these topics revolves in large part around treating psychological problems, especially schizophrenics. Here, he departs from Freud a bit (and I would think Jung too) in his concept of a meaning matrix. It's not enough, Binswanger seems to suggest, that objects have universal meanings (e.g., cigars as penises). We need to know why they have those meanings, what that meaning's significance is, and whether that meaning applies to a given person's situation. In this, I think Binswanger is a bit more practical--dreams do ultimately need to be seen in a personal rather than universal context for interpretation.

Binswanger's ideas of schizophrenia rest in these ideas of what constitutes reality. To him, a schizophrenic is one who loses "being-in-the-world." Such a person creates a world of his or her own, a world that is ultimately dislodged from the world and from the true self. The neurosis and fear becomes the center of existence, and thus the person ceases to exist in a real way. If All facts are interpreted through a twisted worldview. Thus, old clothes might become, for one person, for example, a harbinger of death, of old skin, and all actions then work their way out to avoid this.

If freedom of choice is based on the opportunities presented to us, the insane person actually lacks choice. He or she is handed a sleight of predetermined ideas or interpretations of the world, and all sensory perception is thus guided by them, as are all decisions. In this idea, it seems, Binswanger merges ideas of existentialism with those of psychology.

Binswanger is at his most lucid in his essay on the case of Lola Voss. Here, his theoretical discussions take on a concreteness that allows one to see them in action. It was in this essay that I began to feel, finally, like I was sort of beginning to understand what was being argued.

I suppose, if one wanted to try to apply Binswanger's ideas to Dick's books, Now Wait for Last Year, might be one that one could twist into appropriate shape. For in a sense, that book--about alternative universes--is also a book about interpreting one's reality, and changing one's past and future through such. But Dick's novel works on a very exterior/literal level--thus whatever psychological focus the work has arguably has been literalized as a surface part of the story.

On "This Is the Beginning" by Lili Flanders (496 words) ***

A lot of flash is a flight, and this is one of those. It's a fancy. It's a wish. It's a run at the possible, a stab into the realm of the imagination. It's a list of beautiful details, a list indulged upon, details added to details, ideas added to concrete sights (which are themselves only ideas) added to a plot that becomes not so much one of the story but of the mind, which becomes one not so much one of the mind but of the story. Flanders--she of a foreign city's name--talks here of a simple lunch, of the sights around, of the desires those sights beg of her. And then we see the desires trashed--or come to be. Read it however you want here at Vestal Review.

On "Unhappy Women I Have Loved" by Paul Takeuchi (4411 words) *****

Takeuchi makes the ensemble story look easy. Indeed, breaking stories into discreet bits and giving us each morsel is a common technique. After all, in film, we have one scene followed by another and then by another. Writing has to come in these small portions. But midway through Takeuchi's story, I realized he was doing something slightly different, something a bit more difficult. This is, in the end, a story told mostly as summary--summaries of various relationships. There are some scenes, but mostly there are just very well-told overviews, abstractions about the kind of person each woman the narrator dated was. And they are fascinating--perhaps, in part, because they're all depressed. But there's also just so much love here, so my enthusiasm, so much wordplay. I was reminded of Nabokov. And I wanted more, but alas our narrator stops at three--or four or five--women. Read the story here at the Adirondack Review.

On "The Collected Notes of Gary, 3C, to the Unnamed Tenants of 4C (June 9-Oct 6, 2003)" by Jonny Diamond (1701 words) ***

Not too many years ago a (former) friend of mine (dating back twenty years) decided he no longer wanted to be in contact. Dense as I am, I didn't understand that that was what he was telling me when he said he didn't think we had much in common anymore. True that we had less in common, I surmised, but for me that was not enough reason to stop exchanging messages once every few months or so. And so I continued to write. The messages went nowhere, and on the cusp of the time--a year later--when I was figuring maybe I should no longer bother, the friend finally wrote me back. The message? What was I, a stalker? Wasn't it clear he didn't want to be in contact anymore?

Diamond's story follows a similar tact, though here Gary, from 3C, seems clearly desperate and somewhat insane. Perhaps, he only seems that way because I am the third person here, not the first. Nevertheless, this one-sided collection of messages is a fun and funny read, which you can do here at Fifty-Two Stories.

On "Salvage Sputnik" by Sam S. Kepfield (7623 words) ***

Kepfield's story is one of the most interesting pieces of science fiction I've read in a while. I find it interesting because it doesn't seem far from possibility. Decades down the line, what happens here could well be happening in real life. The story revolves around a company that decides to go into the space salvage business. By this time, corporations have taken over much of the space race, bringing meteors into Earth's orbit to serve as hotels and mining stations. In the end, the story is about law--and about lawsuits--which proves to be rather fascinating when space is at stake. Who owns all the junk out there? And who gets to reap the rewards? I can't help but feel a bit ambivalent about the narrator here, who seems perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to make a buck, even if American taxpayers end up footing the bill (well, sort of--after all, junk is junk, worthless until someone decides it isn't anymore). Read the story here at Electric Spec.

On "Exposure of the Breasts While Being Demeaned" by Dennis Kaplan (8445 words) *****

I like a good mystery, especially when it doesn't involve murder or some other typical crime. Creating a mystery is a natural way to make a story interesting, since readers are curious people. In a sense, all stories are mysteries of a kind. We read to find out what happened or what will happen. We read to find out how a character changed or didn't. We read to find out why a character is the way he or she is. We read for information we do not know.

Kaplan's "Breast" story is a mystery that may or may not involve a crime. It's rooted in a strange phone call that one Lillian Kern receives one day regarding a psychology experiment in which she once took part. Someone's trying to track down the participants--ten years later. Who is this person and why do they want to know who was involved? That's just the start. As the story proceeds, we end up wondering if the experiment is what it was supposed to be or whether more sinister ideas were at work--or whether those doing the tracking are more sinister. I even ended up wondering at one point about the main character's husband. The piece, as I'm thinking of it now, actually reminds me a bit of Thomas Pynchon, which its focus on these kind of why questions about our pasts interacting with worlds we cannot even begin to fathom. In fact, the whole search seems, in a way, like yet another psychology experiment of dubious taste--but then, as the narrator's husband might say, that's life. This one seems much shorter than its 8,000-plus word length. Read the story here at Eclectica.