Title: Elevator
Author: Nancy Kress
Published: Eclipse Two, 2008
Genre: Fantasy, short story
Rating: 5/10
Thoughts: It's a commonly used plot technique: put a bunch of characters into forced confinement with each other and watch interesting things come out of it. Elevator begins with a number of people stuck together in a hospital elevator. No help comes for hours while characters deal with their issues. Typically, this is the sort of plot I enjoy, but I found these characters not very interesting and the story resolution rather anti-climatic. I am also somewhat opposed to the message as a whole, many problems are just resolved for the characters with no action of their own and at the end I didn't feel there was much to take away from the story.
I actually liked this one a bit more than you did. I read it for the Out of This World Mini-Challenge and I gave it a 4.25 out of 5. I ended my review with:
ReplyDelete"Kress’ narrative voice and pacing had me locked into the story, and though the ending contains a slightly vague exchange between two characters, I still really enjoyed this story."
so, there was obviously something in the story that clicked for me at the time.
I did not have a hard time reading through the story, but I felt the lack of closure and meaning at the end of the story spoiled the experience for me.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like the elevator setting was just a pretext to tell a bunch of stories otherwise disjoint. Even when they all met, the characters in no way affected each other, which is the main source of my disappointment.