Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories by Abbey Mei Otis, is certainly an interesting collection. As the title suggests, the stories delve in the well-trod areas of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, climate change, and then a series of tales that defy categorization, and sometimes sense.
This lack of conventional clarity occurs toward the middle of this book, and by the end is fully in bloom. I did not necessarily mind it, although I missed the voice of the first few stories. Otis was balancing the demands of genre with a very deep investigation of character. She was weaving beauty in ugly situations.
Then there is the shift, and Otis loses me. In the end it does not matter. She probably planned the stories this way. As our world sinks further into a morass of non-meaning, our fiction should reflect this as well.
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