Quiet Mountain Essays

Copyright © 2009

Little Pockets of Alarm
by Kat Meads  






Main Street Rag Publishing - $14.95
available from Main Street Rag

Meads’ latest offering, Little Pockets of Alarm, is a delightful romp over the unseen edge.  
A  collection of what the author calls “brief fictions,” this hearty charmer is chock-full of feisty, but
often hapless, characters whom inhabit their own special realities.  Don’t we all?

We meet each of these souls in episodic fashion.  Which is to say, Meads plops the reader matter-of-
factly into the action.  All we need to know, we learn at the scene – which usually wraps up inside
of four pages or less, making each Little Pocket a tasty treat.  Creating such depth, within such
brevity, is an admirable feat for a story artist to accomplish.  Also to Meads' credit, no matter how
surreal the premise of a tale, its characters never seem unreal to the reader.  We can empathize
with these marvelous characters and, in some instances, even relate to their predicaments.

Enjoy an escalating episode of road rage, reinvented in Meads' hands as something akin to a strip-
off.  Visit with a bureaucrat in charge of Time, as she goes about her job.  Learn how an innocent
boycott of Ramona’s hair salon leads to a fatality.  And, lest I forget, there was that donkey-slash-
poisoning episode in Greece...

In Little Pockets of Alarm, Meads feeds us nibbles - and we come away full!

- Suzanne Sunshower

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