Bart Hopkins, $1.99, ISBN 978-1536518146
Horror, 2013
Bart Hopkins’s Dead Ends is a collection of three short stories, just in time for… wait, since I watch horror most of the time, it’s not like there is any special time of the year for that genre in this website. So yes, it’s another day that ends with a Y then.
We kick things off with Recalculating. Maggie, a garage sale addict, is compelled to purchase a GPS at one of these sales. She and her husband then decide to use the GPS to… drive blindly around to the Chisos Mountains, I suppose, since they are dependent entirely on that device.
Sadly for them, this is a horror story, so what awaits them at the end of the journey isn’t a vacation of a lifetime.
This one is tad predictable, and I’m far more distracted by how these people don’t seem to have a backup map or anything. 2013 isn’t that long ago, they could have looked up online for directions, surely? No, let’s trust the GPS even when it’s taking them down a suspiciously wrong route!
Still, the denouement is adorably gruesome, so it’s okay.
Sweet Lenora is next. This one is a bit of an eye roll. Lenora has always been under the thumb of her mother, who dictates every detail in Lenora’s life. Lenora likes a boy, her mother insists that she goes out on a date with another guy, and stuff happens.
Under-baked is what I’d describe this one. The character study doesn’t work because Lenora isn’t well-developed enough to be a complex character, and the story turns into a cartoon the moment everyone starts flinging the other person like a child having a tantrum and flinging away Lego bricks.
Finally, there’s Donations. This one is about the intersection of two people’s lives. One guy needs a kidney for his dying wife. A head librarian is stalked. Ooh, what happens next?
This one is silly if one knows even a bit about kidney transplants. The donor and the recipient needs to have some minimum levels of compatibility: blood type, tissue type, et cetera. Hence, simply killing people on blind, without even knowing whether they have a donor card, just to increase the chances of one somehow getting a kidney from a deceased person is a horrifyingly inefficient method.
It’s far more effective to pick out a compatible victim and off that fellow, no? Then dig out the kidney and rush to a backstreet surgeon that will do the surgery?
Anyway, the stories by themselves are… alright, I suppose, although they seem to get dumber with each story. I won’t say that this one is bad, but I’m not brimming with enthusiasm about it either. It’s kinda meh, so three oogies and a heap of oh well, whatever sound about right.
