Hiding In Theaters and Other Stories

The short story is a snapshot of its author's perception of the world in which he or she is living, its denizens and events illustrating (not always intentionally) the dominant features of the times. F. Scott Fitzgerald's many stories, for example, illuminated the hedonism of the nineteen-twenties, while those of master spy storyteller, Eric Ambler, evoked the clouds gathering over Europe in the nineteen-thirties. Frederick Harrison's focal point is the second decade of the twenty-first century, his stories sometimes serious, sometimes not. "The Universal Toka-Woka," for example, explores the implications of delivering fast food over the Internet, while in "#TheJesusApp" three young geeks seek to gain fame and fortune channeling their inner-Zuckerberg. A "Distant Date Certain," however, tells what happens when the brilliant success of NASA's interstellar exploration program reveals more than we really want to know. There are eight short stories in the collection, the title novella being sort of a bonus. It is the story of a man and woman who meet in a movie theater while hiding from life, and are reborn.