Edge of the Known Bus Line
James R. Gapinski

Edge of the Known Bus Line by James R. Gapinski

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dark snark at its best. Creepy as Stephen King’s Desperation but closer. Closer to home. Sounds too messed up to be reality, but it is. Value is arbitrary, uselessness is arbitrary, to be useless is to be thrown away, Out of Service, and to be out of service doesn’t mean to disappear. It means to hang around, ignored, long after you don’t want to anymore, like plastic bottles in the ocean. In Out of Service, all you’re good for is your meat, which doesn’t do anybody any good. Like all a plastic bag is good for in the ocean is poisoning animals who don’t deserve to be poisoned. Reality. And if only it wasn’t so easy to enjoy. Gapinski’s prose has the funny-creepy air of the too-familiar, the cynic’s way of being so indifferent that you have to laugh, only of course nobody’s perfectly indifferent. Out of Service is where hopelessness falls through its own cracks and keeps on falling.

A favorite bit: “…hardened surfaces always reveal themselves to be illusions…”




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