Review: Mind Freak by Phil Rossi

My first thought when beginning to read Mind Freak by Phil Rossi was that it was a political commentary thinly veiled as sci-fi. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I like 1984 and Animal Farm. The problem was that the first bit of the story didn’t feel like the future as police jumped out of a car and arrested someone without probable cause or a search warrant.

Since this is flash fiction I’ll avoid a summary and say this really is a future scenario and it’s exploring an interesting idea and since I don’t know when this story was written I can neither confirm nor deny that it was inspired by real-life events and while I feel like I could probably make a reasonable guess as to the authors opinion of them based on this story I will refrain from politics as much as possible.

Flash fiction is hard, and this is a well-written story. As with anything this short, it is more a glimpse into some place than anything else. It’s a photograph more than it is a movie, but it’s a well-taken photograph.

Since this is an illustrated story I would be remiss to not comment on the art by Allen Forrest. It captures a moment in the story better than I might have assumed at first glance, and the subtle hints help to suggest some interesting points about the setting, though I’m not sure what the armband with the Y on it is meant to represent.

There is an elegance to brevity that I’m not always successful with and while I can’t say that Mind Freak by Phil Rossi is a perfect story it is a story which explores both the dangers and difficulties of our current world and an interesting idea and likely in fewer words that it took for me to talk about it. Seriously, you could have read it already and formed your own opinion in the time it took you to read this. Go.