The Object Serial
(Episodes 1, 2, and 3)
Winston Emerson
Amazon Digital Services
Fiction, Sci-Fi
** (Bad)
DESCRIPTION: Today, in Louisville, Kentucky...
Smart, shy Lillia lives with her brother Drake and sister Kate in foster care. Used to being treated like dirt by classmates and foster parents, she was barely phased when the drunken, leering college boy tried following her home.
Danny woke up after an all-night bender on a stranger's doorstep, half-covered in his own vomit. His cell's almost out of juice, his friends are nowhere in sight, and he's lost his wallet along with his short-term memory.
Meredith just started as a cop three days ago... three days that have made her reconsider her chosen field and city of residence. The other cops don't like her, the people don't like her, and she just nearly ran over a citizen fleeing an attacker. And Day Three isn't even over yet...
Sherman lives on the streets, trying to avoid trouble as he begs for change from a population that considers him invisible, either because of his black skin or his homelessness. When the rich aren't ignoring or belittling him, street gangs are robbing him of the few dollars he manages to scrape together.
These lives, and many others, would weave through any normal day on the streets of Louisville, briefly entangling before going their separate ways. But then the Object appeared. A great, looming sphere in the sky, something about it seems to bring out the worst in people. Within minutes, chaos consumes the city, panic gripping the populace in waves of riots and shootings. Wherever the Object came from, whatever it wants, Louisville will never be the same...
A Kindle-exclusive title.
REVIEW: The first part in a sci-fi serial series, it promised apocalyptic/dystopian paranoia and sci-fi mystery. (And, yes, it was free when I downloaded it.) Unfortunately, the sci-fi part of the story hardly comes into play: in these first three parts, the titular Object simply shows up and watches the chaos its arrival creates, without tangibly affecting anything. That leaves dystopian paranoia to carry the day... a task at which it fails, owing to an utter lack of an actual story. Maybe Emerson establishes that in the next installment, but this fragmentary introduction simply features a bunch of mostly-unlikeable people in miserable situations whose lives only become more miserable due to circumstances beyond their control. There just plain isn't enough here to interest me, let alone convince me to keep following this listless, unpleasant slog through the Object's shadow.
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