Time once again for a Tuesday short story review. Today's story was a bit shorter than the previous ones I've read, so the length of this review will likely be short as well. Still, fiction of any length deserves to be read and analyzed.

Goodreads support has told me that the spoiler tags for the HTML coding this blog runs on currently do not work, so my articles may contain minor spoilers for the foreseeable future. I'll try not to give away anything too important while looking the narrative elements and tropes used in these stories.

Now, on to the main event...

The story takes place in a semi-dystopian America where the country has become dominated by a right-wing, dogmatically Christian society. The economy is crumbling, homelessness is pandemic, members of the LGBT community are being shipped off to reeducation camps, and the entire country is held in the grip of the military and the police, who are nearly indistinguishable from each other now. The story follows a conflicted man living in this society, racked with stress over the wildly escalating political climate, his failing marriage, his relationship with an old co-worker, and a far stranger problem...

The main character mentions that he has been losing weight, that things have been leaving his body. He's not sure what these are, but he knows that they're alive. Before he can do anything about them, these creatures born from his body scurry off to hide in the walls. He hears them though, whispering and moving, and he develops a grim suspicion that they are plotting against him. As he goes to meet with his lover, he discovers that he's not the only one suffering from this surreal ailment, and the implications of that revelation unsettle him deeply.

Right off the bat, I want to point out what a great job this story does of setting up its world building and tone in a concise manner. Not only does the character reveal information about himself in some early exposition, but its colored by his personality, and we as the reader get a better feel for who he is as a person as he begins detailing the world he has been thrust in. This turns an otherwise dull information dump into vital sections where we learn who he really is, through his thoughts on the world, the people in his life, and his actions.

With that said, the two aspects of the story seem very separate. The dystopian right-wing society doesn't tie in at all with the more personal story of the main character's rising paranoia caused by the little creatures spawned from his own body. We don't really get an explanation for them either, but that's secondary to the fact that the world of the story and the actual narrative don't seem to connect at all.

This next part is a bit spoilery, for which I WOULD use the spoiler tags, but since they're nonfunctioning I'm just going to barrel forward. The tiny creatures spawned from the main character and his romantic interest are interestingly grotesque, though personally I found them a little too alien. The fact that they come from humans made me originally think that they'd appear somewhat human themselves, like tiny, horrific homunculi. This would make the titular act of Autophagy more chilling, because it would reinforce the cannibalistic nature of the act. As they stand, they're just sort of gross alien things eating people, which we've seen. This is something we've seen before, and I feel it was a missed opportunity to make them like that.

Now, my interpretation may be incorrect, so feel free to correct me in the comments, but I can see how the tiny Autophages (not a term used in the story) connect with the theme of the dystopian culture. Things got to that point, with dogmatic morality controlling society to such a degree that premarital and extramarital sex is illegal, because people ignored the signs. They saw troubling things but ignored them, thinking that they were out of their hands or that they wouldn't inevitably snowball into something far worse. Little, tiny problems, but always in the foreground, always surrounding us, building up until they finally destroy us. I think that's a wonderful metaphor, and the bones of a great story are in Autophagy, but unfortunately the two parts of the story don't seem to connect that well together. There's no wider mention of the Autophages outside of the main character's own personal conversations and experiences, with all of the urban decay and moral degeneration easily being attributed to human beings simply being human (a line I stole from Brian Keene's The Darkness on the Edge of Town). Just because elements connect well thematically doesn't necessarily mean they do the same thing on a narrative level.

The political commentary in the story does pair fairly well with the story on a thematic level, narrative it feels like there are two stories going on that barely intersect. There is some great writing here, with good dialogue and believable emotion, but, again, the story itself is strangely disjointed. I'm also As such, my verdict on the story is a 2/5. I will be looking for more of Ray Garton's work, even if this story kind of missed the mark.