BRIDGET HAS DISAPPEARED by Tamika Thompson

“To find a horror book by a black writer,…”

…or an SF book. This work is the optimum compelling and horror-evolving fiction, in the context of this particular SF book, a book that shape-shifts away as a magazine, and recurrently vice versa when in the reality of my hands. Story and novel recurrently also, as a novelette. A work that shares a sense of the seeded parallel worlds in the Alexander Glass and amazingly, explicitly the sudden empty child’s swing in the Cristofari, and the latter’s spiritual morphings after plague as well as Cristofari’s reference to ‘hurricanes and heatwaves’ leading here, in the Thompson, to global riots and inhumanity, as a pre-echo of our own times now returning to base. All within the frame of two people finding their perfect sexual-love match in a bookshop, but she (in the narrative eyes of the male half of this couple) is also the match that lights a dangerous cinnamon cigarette….
You will need to read this haunting work before I spoil it for you by telling you any more details about it. Suffice to say, the wrenching story of the couple’s relationship and their small boy child, and the act of strobing in and out of existence in Zeno slow motion is one that has long plagued some of my own thoughts when writing. Here, when we eventually learn the SF rationale of such strobing, everything is optimised beautifully-horrifically, and really is the seed that grew elsewhere as the writerly source of what is implied here as a circle of truth. Readerly delusions and any tracking monitor apps, notwithstanding.

The full INTERZONE context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/23/interzone-292-293/

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My ancient references to Strobe History: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/strobe-history/

”A textual exegesis or, if not, perhaps the strobe theory of history was a true one, after all.” (Nemonymous Night, Chômu Press 2011)