Click

Kristopher Young

It's always rough reviewing a book written by a friend. What do you do if it sucks? Thankfully, I have had a great run of luck with books written by those I know; they steadfastly refuse to suck. Click is the latest entry in that particular niche. While it's not for everyone, it certainly doesn't suck.

The book opens with our narrator playing Russian Roulette with himself, a ritual he enacts every morning after waking up. The click of the hammer on the empty chamber supplies the book's title. Our unnamed narrator is already, obviously, living way on the edge, so when strange things begin to happen to him, at first he doesn't really notice. Eventually, he does, and so do we; he sees certain life-changing (not necessarily life-changing for him, but for those involved) events as loops in time, and finds he is capable of changing those events within the loops-- saving lives or taking them at will. Well, it would be at will, except he can't figure out how to control it. The other possibility, of course, is that he's crazy. He can't tell based on his girlfriend; she's crazier than he is.

The book is a fun mix of survival thriller, existential meditation, and cerebral horror novel. Young's narrator has an appealing, if somewhat psychotic, voice that keeps the pages turning, and before long the events are so far off-kilter that the reader will start forgoing food and sleep simply to find out how much weirder it's going to get.

If the book has a problem, it's that the resolution leaves something to be desired. Without going into too much detail, to avoid spoiling anything, Young's chosen first-person voice prevents him from giving us the big picture that the events in the final third of the book demand; however, it's a limitation we can live with while hoping there will be a sequel. As a final note, it's fantastic to see a micropress book that contains so few typos; Click was a labor of love, and it shows. A promising debut, both for the author and the press. Recommended.