In “Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds” by Jodi Lee the lead tells the reader at the opening that she’s crazy, to put it lightly. In fact she doesn’t know much, other than she’s crazy and she’s hearing voices in a house. She’s not just hearing the voices of the tortured and murdered children that live between the walls, but there’s an impostor named Maya who looks like her doing horrible things. The drama is turned up pretty high on this one, it’s successfully moody and dark, but the concreteness of the “house” is open to interpretation, which could work for or against the tale depending on the reader’s views.

Full review – because when Michele does a review of an anthology, she does it all – story by story.

And – here is the review of Clipped – from Fried! Fast Food, Slow Deaths:

“Clipped” by Jodi Lee is the only non-theme tale in the story. It is, however a tale of consumption, specifically a tale of pica, the compulsion to eat nonfood items. Norman, an accountant working alone one night is quite creepy in both his obsession with coworker and the pica. Like other stories in this book the tale could have been strengthened if pica was part of a progressive storyline rather than making it the story itself.

And the link for the Full Review. I’m not sure if I’d run Clipped through the crit board ‘back in the day’, but at one point, Norman ate a lot more stuff, and there was absolutely no fast food in it, and I re-wrote it twice for Fried!, once before sub and once after. Norman is my Milton – and originally he ate nothing but staples from a Red Swingline stapler. Anyway, I can see Michele’s point: coming at it from pica would have tweaked it just a bit. Now I’m kinda wondering what started Norman off, why pica, why.. oh, crap. Now I’m thinking about the squirrels.

Help!