The Seep by Chana Porter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm of two minds on this one.

It's like it attempted to go Weird Fiction by way of a symbiotic alien infestation that just tries to make the world better for all the people it invests itself in -- which is pretty great, all told -- but instead of rolling with the societal changes like I'd expect from something that flirts with being Weird, it insists on making the case for unhappiness in grief at all costs.

This could be the moral of the story, of course, but it's willfully obstinate and depressive.

We literally see the end of capitalism and ownership and a lot of people actually find happiness in this communal lifestyle, a realization that we're all connected and hurting another just hurts oneself in a very real sense.

And then we have someone who can't accept her partner's transition to a child-state and goes on a drunken odyssey of revenge, self-harm, and obsession over a boy who has his own issues with paradise.

So what is the point? Bliss is idiocy? Self-harm and unhappiness is valid? Of course, it could just be the JOURNEY.

I don't know how I feel about this. It rubs me wrong. But otherwise, it seemed to be fairly interesting even if it didn't fall head-first into the Weird subgenre as I would have wished. The human condition message, in this case, was somewhat unsatisfying, even if it got all floaty and dream-like by the end.

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