Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Red

Tor fantasy short story, free to read online at Tor.com. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature (click on the link for several more online short fiction reviews):

Ansel, age 17, is playing a homemade board game with his parents. It’s a type of detective game, a little like Clue, and it once was a favorite game of Ansel and his younger sister Louise. Louise has been missing for some time, and Ansel, who was the last person to see her, has been racking his brain, trying to figure out a way to find her. In his desperate grief, he finds himself inside of the game, playing the part of a detective, seeking clues to Louise’s whereabouts from the characters in the game.

“Red” is a fascinating story: The gradual disclosure of the story of Louise’s disappearance in the real life scenes, and its effect on Ansel’s family, interweaves so well with Ansel’s investigation inside of the game. It’s never clear whether he is actually magically inside the game, having found a portal into another world, or whether it’s in his imagination, or is a psychotic effect of his guilt and sorrow. The characters he meets inside the game have many of the same limitations that they do in the actual board game, but there’s some flexibility there, as with the LIBRARIAN:

They’d drawn her as a kind of caricature. She had a large undifferentiated shelf of breasts, bee-stung lips, absurdly high heels. But she was philosophical about it. They just made me, she always said. I am me.

I loved everything about this story … except the ending. It’s abrupt and annoyingly ambiguous, though perhaps I’m simply not perceptive enough to get the author’s subtle clues. Confusingly, there are both positive and negative images and hints, both light and dark. Despite multiple rereadings of the ending, it’s simply not clear to me whether Ansel’s direction at the end is a positive step for him or a nihilistic one. Ansel says, in the end, “Ok, I get it” … but I don’t. (view spoiler)[I'm leaning toward the nihilism theory, because the ending feels downbeat, but I'd love to be shown that I'm wrong. (hide spoiler)]

But this very bittersweet story is still really appealing to me.