The Human Condition

Tragedy. Betrayal.

The horrific cruelty of humanity.

Can any of us deny these darker angels haunt the deeper recesses of the human psyche, wanting and wailing the siren's song to draw the soul of man into the darkened woods of itself, into the very pit of hell?

In The Human Condition: Short Stories of Tragedy, Betrayal, and the Macabre, coauthors Derrick Harvey and Jerome Dickson explore these themes in a personal, frank, and shocking manner. There is no god in the places they travel. Some people chose to walk in the shadows, to investigate and confront the less civilized aspects of human nature of which the majority of us would prefer to pretend no longer not exist. Harvey and Dickson are clearly of the former lot, and in The Human Condition, they take a certain halting pleasure in telling us of their findings.

From tales of murderous betrayal and the tragic repercussions of unresolved childhood trauma to the gruesome nature of a serial killer's cat-and-mouse obsession with a burnt-out detective and the mania that consumes a brow-beaten husband on his wife's birthday, the twelve short stories told in The Human Condition could be viewed as an exposition of an emotionally disturbed mind expressed in a collection of allegories that never seem to touch the moral lesson, lest the truth therein be exposed.

Why don't you give it a read and tell us what you think? Is there an existential truth buried in the fiction? Or is this collection of situational tales merely the mad ramblings of a sick mind?

What do you have to lose but your pretentious sense of morality?