I realized the choice was never mine to make. I was a casualty of past decisions. Sins of the father, and his father, and his father...
Kaleidoscope
by Derrick R. Lafayette
Genre: Sci-Fi Shorts
About: A collection of short stories set in both ordinary and fantastical worlds. In these pages you'll go bounty hunting, flee demons, obsessively search the skies, survive an apocalypse, invade space, and runaway to live a little.
The Good
This is a really unique and memorable collection. Each tale drips in a dreamlike quality, easing in philosophical questions and blurring reality with the uncanny. Of course I had some favourites. The Oddity of Jo Bobby and The Seven Doors is the first in the collection and instantly gripped me - the title alone is a hook! The tone and setting is quite different from the rest but it gives a good sense of what this collection is about: dark pasts, surreal traps and no-one is quite who they seem. Another favourite was The Witness which has a really distinct POV and harkens back to classic sci-fi, melding religious hysteria and obsession with the supernatural. The last short of this collection is Heather, Ludwig and Nathaniel which has beautiful character growth and very interesting revelations.
Like most short fiction, the ending is the crux of the story and in all of these shorts there's a special twist to leave you with something to think about. I really appreciated the look into mental health and this recurring theme of tragic past mistakes.
The Bad
The stories, for the most part, throw you straight into the action. This works in the ones that are set in our world, but for the stories like Demon Road or The Sixty-Five Percent, I think more time needed to be spent attaching the reader to the characters and grounding us in the unusual setting before diving into the action. The worlds and plots were interesting, but they were a little more confusing, making the story abstract and difficult to invest in compared to the others.
The Somewhat Iffy
Some very minor things that didn't quite click for me were in the longest story, which is Heather, Ludwig and Nathaniel. While it's still one of my favourites, I did feel that Nathaniel's POV wasn't needed. The story really felt more of an exploration of Heather and Ludwig's relationship, and I loved that side of the story so much. The mother and son, by the end, had made significant discoveries about themselves which I didn't quite get from Nathaniel. I was also really shocked when Heather wrote in Ludwig's personal diary. I understood the significance of the moment and appreciated the emotion that went with it, but I just imagine the horror of finding someone had not only read but actually written in one of my personal journals and how violating that would feel for me.
Overall
An imaginative collection that uses classic science-fiction staples to explore our minds, our loves and what we strive to live for. If you love sci-fi and want to dip into the weird and wonderful, this is a great collection to delve into late at night!
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