Ushers by Joe Hill Narrator: Leon Nixon
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, paranormal, short stories, thriller
Pages: 29
Length: 56 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads
A young man who has improbably escaped death twice reveals his secret in a spine-tingling short story by New York Times bestselling author Joe Hill.
Martin Lorensen is a twenty-three-year-old counselor for disturbed teenagers. He’s bright, compassionate, attractive, and outgoing. He’s also—and this is the most interesting thing—not dead. Martin has improbably survived not one but two deadly disasters that claimed dozens of lives. The kid is riding one hell of a lucky streak. Two federal agents think there is something darker at play. Now that they’ve arranged to interview Martin, they want answers. Martin is ready to share everything he knows. One thing is for certain: when it comes to escaping death, luck doesn’t figure into it at all.
My Review:
There are plenty of stories about trying to ‘cheat’ death by attempting to subvert a prophecy. These stories don’t even have to be speculative fiction in any way whatsoever.
After all, Oedipus’ tragedy has been told and retold for more than two millennia at this point. Not centuries, millennia. Since approximately 400 B.C.E. While it’s a bit more famous these days for the psychological concept of the Oedipus Complex, the story that leads to the complex is a result of Oedipus’ father trying to subvert a prophecy.
Ushers isn’t quite like that – not in the sense that it’s about attempting to subvert a prophecy, but in the sense that it’s about death coming for us all, literally, and that even if someone does their damndest to save a particular person, death will still have their due.
In this particular story that old, familiar idea is mixed with something a whole lot newer, because at first it seems as if the story is straight out of the X-Files. A young man has managed to get himself out of the way of death. Twice. And it makes the cops, or at least two particular cops, extremely suspicious.
Especially that second time around, when he convinced someone else to get themselves out of the way as well.
Special Agents Duvall and Oates don’t find ANY of Martin Lorensen’s jokes and misdirections funny – not even the ones about their names. They’re pretty sure he didn’t commit any crimes in regards to his near brushes with death – but they are both damn certain he’s hiding SOMETHING.
As good cops do, they can’t resist poking and prodding at Lorensen to get the answer. Or what Lorensen believes is the answer. An answer that no cop could possibly accept. At least not until that answer comes for them.
Because death does, indeed, come for us all. With a quota that has to be filled – one way or another.
Escape Rating A-: This wasn’t exactly I was looking for. OTOH, it was very much what I was looking for as I was searching for a short audiobook on a Friday. I didn’t want to start something longer knowing it would likely be three days until I got back to it – and this caught my eye and here we are.
The narrator, Leon Nixon, did a terrific job with the characters. As there are only three, it was VERY easy to distinguish the voice and mannerisms between the three, and the audio was just the right length for the time I had available. Also, this is part of the Amazon Originals Collection and was free as part of Kindle Unlimited. A win all the way around for this reader/listener.
At first, the story reminded me a LOT of a police procedural. It certainly has that format, two cops interviewing a person of interest who might be a suspect. But the vibe for that was just a bit ‘off’. Not that the story wasn’t well done, but rather that even at the outset Martin Lorensen is an unlikely suspect at best. Even though it seems like both Duvall and Oates are playing ‘bad cop’ and there’s no actual ‘good cop’ in sight.
Although at least Duvall is trying. It’s just that Martin Lorensen is very trying from his perspective and he’s having a hard time holding back his irritation.
Still, the events that Lorensen managed to escape are wildly different, and the cops actually know what happened in both cases. But still, the idea that Lorensen left his high school just minutes before a school shooter opened fire AND walked away from a prepaid first class train ticket just an hour or so before the train derailed is a bit outside the odds – even though the events are YEARS apart.
Like being hit by lightning twice in one lifetime. Or rather, NOT being hit by lightning twice in one lifetime. Or both.
The case felt like something straight out of the X-Files, but also mixed with a very old SFnal short story. Specifically, Robert A. Heinlein’s first published story, all the way back in 1939, “Life-Line”. (No, I’m not THAT old, I read it in his Expanded Universe collection several decades later. I still have the paperback to prove it!)
“Life-Line” is the story of a man who can precisely predict anyone’s death. Ushers isn’t quite that, but it also isn’t NOT that. Lorensen doesn’t predict death, but he does see it coming. And the effect is every bit as creepy as that early story – and very much vice-versa.
I tend to shy away from outright horror stories, so the author was someone I knew about but hadn’t read. After listening to Ushers, that’s going to change, because this story was right on that edge of creepy, tiptoeing towards horror by implication, that I really enjoy when I’m in the right mood for it.
Which I most definitely was!