Adam-Troy Castro's The Shallow End of the Pool, published by Creeping Hemlock Press, just may have been my favorite piece of fiction in 2008. I interviewed Castro a few months ago and ran an excerpt from this brutal, thought provoking tale. In the opening page of blurbs, Jeff Strand comments that discussing the story could spoil it for unsuspecting readers. Jeff wasn't just being lazy with his blurbage, and I agree with his sentiment, which is why I've put off reviewing The Shallow End of the Pool until now; it's also why this review is relatively brief.

Castro takes the manner in which divorced parents can use their children against each other as the springboard for this story, which is part science fiction (in a completely non-technological way), part morality tale, and horror in its purest sense; imagine an AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL in which the main characters are hurled into Thunderdome and told there will be no TV until they kill each other. If Rod Serling were alive today and making THE TWILIGHT ZONE, I believe he would love this book, not because there's some clever O. Henry twist ending--there isn't--but because the story is such a powerful metaphor for the way human beings use and abuse each other. This is a case in which the emotional violence wreaked may be more vicious than the physical damage that's inflicted.

Castro is one hell of a writer. He twists a sentence with the same economical precision that his characters might twist a razor sharp knife. Months after reading this novella, the images that the language call to mind continue to linger in my imagination, and I'll never look at an empty swimming pool the same way again. It's easy to see why The Shallow End of the Pool was just nominated for Dark Scribe's Black Quill award.