John Avide Lindqvist's "You Have to Read This!" has the most familiar feel to it of the three short stories and the novel excerpt; Lindqvist is easily the most famous of these writers in English, due to the success of his novel Let the Right One In in translation--it probably doesn't hurt that the source language, Swedish, is the closest to English. Nor that this story is an open tribute to W. W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" set in the online age. Deft, and only slightly telegraphed (IM'd?). WLT's use of Adobe stock illos doesn't help here, where the protagonist, who considers herself unattractive and makes no great efforts to dress "well" or otherwise primp, is represented by a photo of a conventionally pretty young woman with subtle, professional makeup, at her computer.
The Japanese Junko Mase, the only woman writer of the featured quartet, has a story with a Kafka-esque quality, and perhaps more than a nod to Margaret Atwood, portraying a kind of limbo claustrophobic settlement in which a young woman describes and copes with her microcosm of a society that might be a cult, or might be a sad outpost of some of the last surviving humans, 0r both. Thus could be read as science fiction, parable, surfiction or psychodrama.
