BREATHING IS HOW SOME PEOPLE STAY ALIVE

This collection of short stories is advertised as Weird Fiction and Speculative Fiction, which is why I read it. Unfortunately, I don’t really think it delivers what it advertises. It certainly wasn’t what I was looking for.

Since this isn’t a standard science fiction anthology, it isn’t going to get a standard review. But I do want to point out one truly superb science fiction story

The Deal With Roger • (2023) • by Allison Gadsby. A father believes that his tall and fat daughter will never find friends or a husband, so he buys a refurbished police robot for her. Years later, she is still a virgin and in an abusive marriage with that same robot. And now the robot wants to modify himself so he can sexually abuse her. This is harrowing and terrifying and one of the best “evil” robot stories I’ve ever read.

Most of the loosely interconnected stories in this book are realist literary fiction submerged in pain, abuse, and trauma. The level of pain and suffering these experience - emotional and abusive physical - is quite ugly. It was not something I wanted to read. I also didn’t feel like there was any real purpose to the stories. The ends were often a character making the decision that they were going to do something bad.

I found the genre fiction stories better.

“Once There Was a World.” • (2026) •A man’s life is destroyed because, as a child, he fought with his sister and then she vanished. The police believe that an arrested serial killer killed her, but he doesn’t believe it.
“Irreplaceable.” • (2023) • A robot teacher cares for a girl whose mother died. The father resists, but eventually his daughter convinces him to accept the robot as an in-house nanny. Slowly the Father wants the robot to adopt even more “wifely duties.”
“The Going Rate for Grief.” • (2026) •A number of children took robot children into the woods and dismembered them. A series of interrogations try to determine why they did it. Has a few interesting things to say about who is really part of a family.