All Hallow's Read

Crazy Awesome (yet still crazy) author Neil Gaiman's "All Hallow's Read" program wasn't beyond this fan. I celebrated the event by lending my copy of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs (I've linked that title to the book that includes "Other Soviet Satire," because Mikhail Bulgakov's short story was more than just a commentary on Soviet society, it was a part of a larger literary revolution that didn't surface until most of its authors were dead) to a loved one, and in turn recieved the young adult Sci-Fi psychological Mindfuck of House of Stairs. Thanks, dear.

House of Stairs is a young-adult sci-fi about five 16-yr-old orphans who wake up after being bound and gagged in a large room, in which the cielings, walls and floor are unreachable. It is a bigger room than the children can comprehend, and its perimeter is unreachable, at least with their short attention spans it is, so they climb, drop, cross and clamber the stairs-with-no-balustrades and small landings until they meet up with others. And, eventually, a device.

The device delivers food, and is pretty much the source of the rest of the plot as they are put through Pavlovian Conditioning. The problem is, you can sort of see where they're going with this plot from miles away. Yeah, it's wrong to condition kids into committing acts of cruelty, we know that. So there isn't much to gain, but the punchline is fairly funny, because it answers your questions with a "yes, they will do that."

Other than that, I thought the book was mediocre. But then again, I'm not a young adult, and reading young-adult as a "semi-developed-but-self-proclaimed-adult" is not grounds for disqualifying it as a significant novel of its class, so I will go ahead and score this one as a a "good novel," all things considered.