On the Brink

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"Three fiction pieces by author Fitzell track a monk seeking ultimate truth in cyberspace, a fashion model’s surreal life, and a spinster teacher’s traumatic pilgrimage to Ireland. Fitzell’s trilogy (technically two short stories and a novella) shows a delirious love for language and blends sci-fi, fantasy, fabulism, and horror.... The longest, most accessible piece, the macabre “Tee Hee Hee... is a 'horror' story mainly in the Flannery O’Connor sense of the spiritually grotesque. It’s definitely the strongest in a trio that may not click for genre fans who expect their shock, awe, and wonder packaged with more standard commercial tropes. A varied trilogy of beautifully described prose pieces, some more esoteric than others."-- Kirkus Reviews "...a captivating and imaginative journey through three classic speculative genres...written with a refreshing inventiveness." -- Publisher's Weekly "a beautiful collection of three short stories that poke at the reader's subconscious, unlike the usual literary fare ordinarily available to us today...a gem of a book!" --Reader's Favorites 5-Star Review ON THE BRINK: A TRIO OF GENRES is an imaginative and inspired literary fiction work, presenting three, unique, totally different stories in three genres: (1) Chapter & Verse, a science fiction tale, follows the thoughts of a monk who creatively expresses his doubts about the existence of God through poetry and essays transcribed onto a computer. (2) ICY: A Fashionable Guise spins out the fantasies of a seamstress in Paris, 're-sewing' her reality into that of a fashion model. Her experiences draw on the terminology of the fashion world and ironically underpin its artificiality as Clotho emerges supposedly more real than her creator. (3) The horror story, Tee, Hee, Hee, imagines Helen Toom, a grade school teacher, as an almost anti-Christ figure, who practices not what she teaches or pretends to be.--Review in amazon.com