This week, having finally finished off all those dystopian stories, I have moved on to something based on Lewis Carroll’s famous stories about Wonderland: Alice, by Christina Henry. No doubt this will be cheerful and wacky, eh?
Then again, maybe not.
If she moved her head all the way up against the wall and tilted it to the left she could just see the edge of the moon through the bars. Just a silver sliver, almost close enough to eat. A sliver of cheese, a sliver of cake, a cup of tea to be polite. Someone had given her a cup of tea once, someone with blue-green eyes and long ears. Funny how she couldn’t remember his face, though. All that part was hazy, her memory of him wrapped in smoke but for the eyes and ears. And the ears were long and furry.
The concept behind this story reminds me of American McGee’s “Alice“, although the two are unrelated.
Wonderland being fertile ground for expansion (not least because it’s in the public domain; the irony of the legendarily “Hey why not let’s make copyright eternal” Disney capitalizing on Lewis Carroll’s work would require even Humpty Dumpty to stretch for new words to describe it), there’s certainly room for multiple Wonderland dystopias. They can even be combined such as in this interesting (and occasionally grotesque) mashup of the song “Her Name Is Alice” (from the Tim Burton “Alice in Wonderland” film, which wasn’t great, but had a good soundtrack) and one of the later entries in the American McGee series, “Madness Returns“.
Meanwhile, speaking of madness returning, this round of editing continues on Father’s Books!
He draped the jacket over his arm, intending to hand it over to Rose, but then a stiff, cream-colored card fluttered out from it somewhere and landed face-up on the bed.
They both stared at it. Rose looked from the card to Richard, looked back at the card. She frowned and turned it over. “There’s an address and phone number written on the back.”
“Do you think it’s his?”
Rose was silent for a moment; then she relieved Richard of the jacket. The pile in the hamper grew incrementally larger.
“Let’s call it and find out,” she said.
Because I’m getting close to the end of the novel, it’s becoming slightly difficult to take sections without introducing spoilers, so some of the text has been redacted this time. To find out what it was, you’ll just have to read the entire thing …
Viscosity 