Scan barcode
A review by tasharobinson
25 Perfect Days by Mark Tullius
2.0
The first short story in this linked-story anthology is a nasty, mesmerizing little vignette about a law that gives the family members of crime victims five minutes alone with the perpetrator, a room full of torture tools and murder weapons, and apparently no limits. It's a story about a father trying to figure out how much vengeance he wants to, or is actually capable of, exacting on the man who raped and killed his daughter. It's violent, stomach-churning, and creatively sadistic.
So when I read the rest of the book, I was looking for more stories as surprising and hard-hitting as this one. Mostly, I got the sadism without the sense of moral searching or inventive situations. The book's full arc tracks the rise of a cultish religious organization that takes over America and becomes a bottomlessly evil fascist regime. Most of the stories are either about people resisting the regime (and dying horribly, or getting dragged off to fates worse than death) or getting ground up by it, either by being civilians running afoul of the latest monstrously evil law (many detailing with arbitrary executions) or by being part of the regime and called upon to commit atrocities. There are recurring characters throughout these stories, but almost none of them have any distinguishing marks from each other, or any sense of characterization; they all become a frustrating blur of names and messy, grotesque deaths. The author seems much more invested in describing the ghastly ways people die, or fight to not die and fail, or try to go about their business and then realize they're going to die, than he seems invested in making them real characters. It feels telling that he ends the book the second a significant blow is made against the regime. There's no catharsis in this book, no sense of difficult victories after a long, dark night of the soul. It just feels like reading a long, loving description of torture.
So when I read the rest of the book, I was looking for more stories as surprising and hard-hitting as this one. Mostly, I got the sadism without the sense of moral searching or inventive situations. The book's full arc tracks the rise of a cultish religious organization that takes over America and becomes a bottomlessly evil fascist regime. Most of the stories are either about people resisting the regime (and dying horribly, or getting dragged off to fates worse than death) or getting ground up by it, either by being civilians running afoul of the latest monstrously evil law (many detailing with arbitrary executions) or by being part of the regime and called upon to commit atrocities. There are recurring characters throughout these stories, but almost none of them have any distinguishing marks from each other, or any sense of characterization; they all become a frustrating blur of names and messy, grotesque deaths. The author seems much more invested in describing the ghastly ways people die, or fight to not die and fail, or try to go about their business and then realize they're going to die, than he seems invested in making them real characters. It feels telling that he ends the book the second a significant blow is made against the regime. There's no catharsis in this book, no sense of difficult victories after a long, dark night of the soul. It just feels like reading a long, loving description of torture.