I read some reviews for this short story before grabbing a copy. Because of this I knew there'd be some touchy, if not very repulsive things that take place in the story. I went into it looking from both sides of the coin hoping that'd give me a better appreciation for the work.

The main character and his good friend/boss are terrible people. I won't get into what they do or how they think in this review. I'd like the reader to find this out on his or her own. All I'm going to mention is 1) you can find out a few Amazon reviews, and 2) I don't think the reader will like it much. It's not the type of behavior society wants to admit can easily exist.

I'm not basing my rating on that "wow, he really wrote a story about this" factor. In that sense, it may even get a better rating from me. It's getting a low rating because I feel a story dealing with themes such as what these evil characters do, how corrupt the town is, etc can only effectively be conveyed to the reader through a longer piece of prose. I'm not suggesting the author would need to write a novel. I just think a longer short story would do it justice; the 3-4 pages that this is didn't work for me. It's not even touching on the surface of what's going on. It felt more of a readers digest version...but there was no "full" version to read if the digest interested the reader.

I almost gave it a 1 star, but I decided that since it has potential it should get 2 stars. It has potential to raise a good amount of awareness to the issues brought up if it was done right. I hope that's what the author wanted to make happen. I'll give the author a little more credit if that was the goal.
( )