Beware Of Owner by Chuck Wendig, Ramón de Ocampo
My rating: 3/5 cats
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!
2016: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2017: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2018: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.
so, let’s begin
DECEMBER 7
i’m not really a day behind already—i swear i listened to this one last night, but i was in too deep an exhaustion-funk to make the fingers type the words. instead, i comfort-ate my last bag of hoarded cadbury mini eggs whilst watching british people good-naturedly make cakes at each other.
will you like this story? here are two facts about it: it is about 8 minutes long and it opens with the shooting of a cat. the cat doesn’t die (yay!) but it is grievously injured (boo!) and that cat is a tortie, which is the best of all cats. so if you like longer stories, or fewer cat-shootings, you have your answer.
leaving aside the emotional bits around its cat-violence fer kicks angle, the story itself is fine. it does that thing of testing the readers’ assumptions and sympathies and the tendency to auto-relate to the protagonist at the outset of a story and it does its work quickly, upending your comfort.
it’s short short short; over and done with, and it’s not the most shocking or original horror, but it does have that campfire appeal—you roll your eyes, but you’re looking over your shoulder as you skewer your next marshmallow.
i’m glad i’m learning to appreciate audio books, and there are so many more of these to come!
read it for yourself here:
https://play.google.com/store/audiobo…
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