This is where it begins, where he discovers the
meaning of life. 
Cover Art – Summer 2022 Issue
It probably didn’t help that
I began rolling my eyes within a few lines of this story. It also didn’t help
that I promptly managed to forget each and every detail within the two days between
when I read it and when I finally sat down to review it. If that doesn’t say
something about how unremarkable it was, then I don’t know how else to explain it.
Written from the point of
view of a killer watching his prey through a rifle’s scope, the story had all
the possibility of intrigue and action, but it sadly didn’t deliver on pretty
much any of its promises. I’m not a huge fan of science fiction, which means I
haven’t read a lot of it and am not as jaded as other readers when it comes to
the tropes of the genre, but even I
felt let down at how poor the world building was, how lacking the exposition
and how weak the entire premise.
I’ve torn my being to shreds, crossing gorges of time
and space, to hunt this midnight moment down.
It wasn’t even just that I
felt no investment in the character’s purpose or the story’s arc, it was also
that the writing was poetic and flowery in all the wrong ways. I’m usually the
first to staunchly defend purple prose even if a plot is weak, because there
can be something so appealing about pretty writing and extravagant sentences,
but over here most of the dramatics made me yawn, or want to skip ahead to the
next scene of consequence. Sadly, there were honestly not many worth counting.
Guilt is a useless weight and it’s time to free myself,
perhaps to join my Sara. I will annihilate myself with my own weapon just as
she was.
The problem with short
stories, I’ve repeatedly said, is that they have such a short amount of words
in which the author needs to create a connection with a reader. Which means
that it takes a very expert touch to allow us to feel the grief or regret that
a character might feel, to connect with it and thus feel interested in the
outcome of the actions they take as a result of that particular emotion. In
this case, our main character is clearly motivated by emotions I didn’t much
care for, and so felt almost zero investment in what was going to happen next.
And of course, none of that was helped at all by the godawful editing of the
story itself.
I tilt my head uncomfortably, my wife is right as
usual.
That’s two sentences. There
should be a full stop there. A semi-colon, if we must, but a comma is just
egregious to an uncomfortable degree. I’m okay with spelling mistakes and
grammatical issues in texts if they happen once or twice. As an editor
myself, I know that no matter how many times you check any written material,
there is bound to be a mistake. I’ve seen books go through five, ten, fifteen
rounds of edits by multiple people, myself included, and still end up with a
question mark where there should have been a colon. Still, a short story is not
only a shorter piece of text to edit, there are some mistakes that are just too
obvious to be missed.
I’ve taken so many drugs, stimulators, inhibitors and
emplacers all my life (cCan’t remember much of Radeshi Port) but even I never
dared touch the one called Buddha’s Smile.
My jaw dropped at that extra
‘c’ in this sentence. Even a cursory copy and paste into Microsoft Word would
give you a squiggly red line telling you that this was, in fact, a wrongly
typed word. I’m not sure how such sub-par editing happened to occur, and am
honestly even more disappointed for the author, who surely doesn’t deserve
having his text treated so carelessly. There was even a random indent of 0.5
inches for one single paragraph smack dab in the middle of the story, and then strictly
left alignment for the rest. Who in the name of all that is holy is responsible
for this formatting?
Honestly, this wasn’t one of
Tasavvur’s best picks. The story was okay, the editing was worse, and even the
surprise twist at the end wasn’t enough to retain my interest. I’m now going to
have to find some good science fiction to cleanse my palate, and hope that the
next desi story I read tries at least a little bit harder to keep me hooked.
Thus Gone by Murtaza Mohsin was published in Issue 003 (Summer 2022) of Tasavvur, an online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found here.