Towers, by Karl Fischer

I've talked about Karl's writing before when I wrote about his as yet unpublished novel Grave Digging in Dreamland. Short recap: I enjoyed it.

That book is still unpublished, however Karl has written a new story and that has been published by Eraserhead Press, personally I feel they are doing him and themselves a disservice by ignoring the book, but I am not a publisher so whatever.

Towers is the new story, a novella is the correct term I think, it's pretty short.

I could actually tell you what I think about it too I guess, I enjoyed it! I bought it a week or two ago and read it, then have been thinking about how to write about it since then. Essentially it is a love story set in a pretty awful future where humanity lives in cyclopean, nuclear armed Towers as a defense against rampaging giant monsters which assault humans constantly for reasons that remain unclear.

Lots of stuff is unclear in the story really, and that is kind of the point I think, like I said it is a love story where two people are trying to find each other and be damned to everything else. If they don't care about the whys and the wherefores, why should we? Nasty, inexplicable shit happens to the protagonist, and he has no idea what is going on either, but it is clear that at least some of the characters do, there is a logic and organization to the things that happen in the story, it's just that no one cares or bothers to explain anything to the reader or the protagonist, so you get a real sense of confusion and isolation.

This would actually annoy me to no end in a longer story, at some point stuff needs to start making sense to me, I tend to stop caring eventually when the author has no interest in explaining themselves or at least giving me hope that something other than relentless horror will happen to someone. But for a short form like this it works quite nicely, keep things tense until the end.

The end does sort of happen kind of suddenly and out of nowhere I thought, I am not sure if that is actually true though or if I just wanted to read about giant monsters for a while longer.

Towers can be bought on Amazon in either print or Kindle format and you should get it if you like weird love stories.

Speaking of weird stuff, I don't usually like bizarro fiction, admittedly I don't read a ton of it but I have dipped into the genre a time or two and often I find the plots incomprehensible and the authors more interested in either being as gross as possible or telling us in great detail about their incredibly specific fetishes rather than actually having a narrative, it's nice to not have to deal with any of that here too, I do have to warn people that gross stuff, and sex stuff, including non-consensual stuff, does indeed happen in the story, so if that isn't for you then, I am sorry, but it really isn't the entire thing.