Sandra Martinez, $0.99, ISBN 978-0463584583
Suspense, 2018
Now, the author claims in her bio that she’s a fan of Tales from the Crypt, which is why I decided to pick this up. Have to support a fan of genre anthology TV from the old days, after all. However, The Late Christmas Gift puzzles me.
Now, this one is about a battered and abused wife finally taking the initiative to hire an assassin to kill her husband. She’s looking forward to his death, on the date as stipulated by the assassin via text message to her phone.
This story goes into some detail about what a monster the husband is, so it’s perhaps understandable that the reader is led, by the author, to believe that this protagonist will get a ending where she will finally be free of that SOB. As gruesome and wicked as any episode of Tales from the Crypt or any other shows or stories of this sort, usually bad things happen to the bad guys. That’s why tropes such as the final girl exists.
However, that’s not what eventually happens here!
This is why I am perplexed by this story. What is the author trying to do here? What she has done here is to basically yank the reader into thinking that the story will go in one direction, only to abruptly smack the reader in the face with a big “Surprise! Subverted your expectations, didn’t I?”
Sure, subvert expectations for all I care, but such subversion need to be earned. This one, though, is just a loud “Gotcha!” that doesn’t offer any satisfying pay-off whatsoever, because it’s just a twist for the sake of having one. If anything, the true take home message here is that five grand to kill someone is probably too cheap a special offer to be true, and one needs to be very selective about the lowlifes one wants to consort with.
However, the author deliberately leads the reader to believe that the story will go in a certain direction, so I guess it will be up to the reader to enjoy the twist or feel annoyed at being yanked by the author. Me, I personally find that the twist doesn’t do anything to elevate the story in any way, so in the end, I feel that the author has done all that yanking and subverting for no good reason.
