Slot Machine Fever Dreams

Obsession Collection

By: Chris Bohjalian

Narrated by: Grace Experience

It’s called Sin City for a reason. Dark secrets emerge when a young bartender meets a stranger on a hot streak in this gritty short story from New York Times bestselling author Chris Bohjalian.

Dove, a recovering alcoholic covered in Emily Dickinson tattoos, serves up drinks and small talk at a casino in Vegas. Russell is a man on a roll. He claims to be a chain-restaurant manager, yet his tells point to different skills. The two leave together at the end of the night, but when all pretense is stripped away, they find themselves in a fight for their lives.

Slot Machine Fever Dreams is part of Obsession, a collection of compulsively readable short stories about people pushed to their extremes. So addictive you won’t be able to put them down—read or listen to each story in a single sitting.

©2023 Quaker Village Books, LLC. (P)2023 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

A few twists packed into a short story

I love Chris Bohjalian's work, but mostly for his fully fleshed out characters and twisty plot lines. Slot Machine Fever Dreams is far too short for such character-building, and instead Bohjalian relies on packing a few unexpected twists into a story that has only a little humanity. Grace Experience does a marvelous job narrating a less than perfect story.

Chris…you are far funnier than I imagined

Imaginative, erudite, well structured…reader was too shrill…story and author’s sensibility more nuanced than reader portrayed

One of my favorite authors, a racehorse confined to an elementary school playground

It was ok, hence the 3 stars. But just ok,. Perhaps he fizzled out his idea, perhaps he discovered his talents diminish without enough space to run free

Short story that never really goes anywhere

If the journey is more important than the destination to you, then this is worth a listen for fans of the author. I have read a few of his novels and loved them; he's not quite as adept in the short story format, IMO.

It was very awkward... for example, the protagonist of the story never said, "I did this, I did that..." She refers to herself as "you." (As in me, the reader.) So, she'd say "You do this, you do that... 'I need to use the phone,' you say. Or: "You reach into your purse." Et cetera. So, it's not only in present tense, which is not my favorite, it's also in this other experimental tense. Really, really odd and makes it hard to connect with the story. (Note: it's not the same thing as the Caroline Kepnes YOU series, wherein Joe is saying "you" in regard to other people in the story.)

Fun!

This was a nice break. The story caught my interest right away. Keep them coming!