Oversight by Michael Bailey

A collection of two novellettes and a short story that will stir your emotions, and make you think.

The first novellette, Dark Room, concerns a pair of elderly sisters who travel back in time to their childhood.

It’s an imaginative way to describe memories, and the theme of shutting your eyes to avoid the truth, which runs through all the stories, is understandable and well explained.

Likewise, the sisters, Annie and Grace, are sympathetic characters that you can easily see and hear throughout their journey.

A moving story, that keeps you reading to find out what will happen.

Next comes SAD Face, a story of Yuliya, who has a prescription prosthetic face, or mask, to help with her Social Anxiety Disorder.

Yuliya’s Social Anxiety Disorder – both her experience of it and how others treat her – is pitch perfect. In fact, it’s so well described that in reading it I walked a fine line between relief that the author ‘gets it’, and actually getting anxious.

Once again the idea of is it better to see the truth or live in willful ignorance is broached, and while I applaud the journey, I found the denouement a little pat.

Finally comes the short story, Fade to Black, about Amber, who nearly drowns when she is ten, and is haunted by the incident.

This story needs more dissection before I arrive at its deeper meaning, but once again the main character’s emotions are well described and compelling, and there is the dilemma to see or not to see.

Although Oversight is billed as dark science fiction, I wouldn’t apply that label myself. However, these stories are well worth reading, and I will watch out for the author in the future.

I award Oversight…

Oversight is available for $3.67 ebook and print book on Amazon.