Opening: It came trickling in over the transom at first, but Hatch's bailing technique had grown rusty. The skies were dark with daily news of a pointless war and genocide in Africa, poverty, AIDS, desperate millions in migration. The hot air of the commander in chief met the stone-cold bullshit of Congress and spawned water spouts, towering gyres of deadly ineptitude. A steady rain of increasing gas prices, grocery prices, medical costs, drove down hard like a fall of needles.
Capsule: Hatch's "bailing technique" has grown rusty and he goes under, sinking into the Drowned World. This is the first story of the LRSF list that truly knocked the air right out of my fucking reading lungs. It's an extraordinary invention. It contains more mind-expanding newness, paragraph by paragraph, than any of the stories I've read so far, and it was emotionally arresting, a steamroller that flattened and squished me and left me arranged in a new shape when I re-assembled myself into quotidian three-dimensionality. This story contains the Other. It was so good I stopped reading it for a few moments just before the end and paced myself: You Know What I'm Talking About. It's already received multiple readings. Seek it out.
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