Carr's Review of Mark's story "Sunday"

Mark,

This is a very interesting story you have here, this story of the theoretical physicist who comes home late and drunk to find his fiancée dead of a gunshot wound. All right. So the physicist – as I’ll call him since he is given no name – comes home late, a little sheepish. He is drunk and he has a big meeting with his fiancée Amanda’s parents the next day. But in his mind he has an excuse. He had a brainstorm late and has made a very important discovery in his lab. When he enters the apartment he sees that Amanda had a very special night planned – good food, good wine, and Luther Vandross? OK. But there is a strange smell and he soon discovers his woman dead. And here is where the physicist does something unexpected: instead of calling the police, he leaves the scene very carefully, goes to his car and retrieves the device he has been working on. He takes this box ut of its case and activates it with a trigger. Then he goes back up the stairs and repeats the scene from the opening. Hmmm. Strange. So the box is some sort of time machine? But it is a time machine that takes him back to the very worst moment of his life, and he is doomed to repeat it over and over. The physicist is like Sisyphus in that regard, always rolling the stone, futilely. Interesting.

OK. So there is a lot to like here. First, the writing is sharp – clear prose with a real voice. There are good details (but Luther Vandross?), and you do a good job with the tension in the apartment – “It isn’t red wine.” The story also has a sense of movement. Even though I’m still unclear about what exactly happened, I’m pretty certain that something is being revealed about the situation and the physicist’s character and dilemma. That’s good.

So where to go from here? Well, right now I think we don’t know enough about the physicist to say that this story is complete. So I’d like to see more scenes with him. I would suggest having some scenes before the night and time of the discovery, but I kinda like that as an opening gambit. Perhaps when he gets to the car and pulls the trigger, you could then jump to an earlier scene, and then jump again. I only say this because I think we need to get to know him and his habits, his thinking process, his life, better. So we can start to piece together some of what is happening with the Sisyphus box and why he acts the way he does.

All right. This story reminds me of something Philip K Dick would do. He liked to play with the notions of memory and technology. Read some of those if you haven’t already. And I definitely encourage you to keep working on this one. Good luck. See me with questions.
CK