Review – Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat
A few months ago I listened to “Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat” by Adam-Troy Castro published in LightSpeed Magazine and I have to say, I hated it.
The premise of this short story is… confusing. Basically, it is a conversation between a victim of an in-progress Kharbat attack and an expert on Kharbats.
Is this conversation happening because the victim has implants which let him converse with anyone at any point? The allusion to candles as a primary light source later in the story would suggest otherwise. So, how is this conversation happening? Not clear.
But that’s not the biggest issue of this story. The biggest issue is that the story comes off as pretentious. That’s right, not the characters, the story itself comes off as pretentious. The basic idea of the story is that given the many imagined monsters and aliens that we write about and talk about, we’ve actually developed a way to fight them. So, in the unlikely even of a zombie attack, we are all well versed on what to do.
However, what about a creature none of us have ever imagined? If such a creature were to materialize, we wouldn’t know what to do. The story takes a step further, imagining a creature that is always just one step ahead of human imagination – as soon as we think of something like a Kharbat, it evolves beyond it.
This premise in itself is ok, but the manner in which it is executed boiled my blood. For example, at one point, on of the characters even says that the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” was trying to figure out what a Kharbat was.
So, yes. Skip this one.
