review

GO FISH – IAN ROGERS

By karen t. brissette

Posted on April 24, 2020

Go Fish by Ian Rogers
My rating: 3/5 cats
One Star

She wasn’t exactly the Neil Armstrong of astral projection, but so what? Practice made perfect, right? And she didn’t need to be perfect today. She only needed to be bait.

if you have already read rogers’ short story collection Every House is Haunted, congratulations! 1) you have good taste in horror/dark fantasy! but also 2) you have already met the canadian team of paranormal investigators in THIS story from having read The House on Ashley Avenue: Short Story, which according to my review and NOT my spotty recollections of anything that happened six years ago, was one of my favorites in the collection.

you don’t need to have read The House on Ashley Avenue: Short Story in order to “get” this one (again—everything that happened to me before, say, an hour ago is all pretty hazy in my mind), but it was nice to have that faint bell rung thru the cobwebs when ashley avenue was name-dropped TWO TIMES in the middle of this.

this story* is on the longer side of the free tor shorts, but if you wanna hunker down and spend some time in a “paranormally polluted” place that’s kind of like where the x-files, syfy original cryptid movies, and lovecraft rub elbows**; a place that is also CANADA, then here’s a freebie for you!

i liked it just fine, although its unexpected length strained my pitiful attention span and it took me a couple of days to focus long enough to make it through. but i have officially stopped watching the news (that show lost me at “inject yourself with disinfectant and pour clorox into your lungs!” total shark-jump, that) so it’s gonna be nothing but me and my carefree blissful ignorance from here on out and i will be fine to do all the things. cool.

* or novelette? i’m still unclear on what a novelette is. wordcounttools.com says this is 24,309 words, so whatever that means oh wait, i don’t have to go to work anymore because pandemic so let’s learn something. a novelette is 7,500—17,000 words, so this is a novella. there. a good use of quarantine time.

** my goodness, how the phrase “rubbing elbows” reads like the most salacious erotica to me here in my socially distant tower.