The New Order

The New Order
by Karen E. Bender

A mixture of short stories, the common theme seems to be dreary, depressing and the just plain weird.  Every once in a while I'll read a book of short stories, though I normally tend to not be a fan. I want more depth in a story, depth that a short story tends to not give me.

The first story is "Where to Hide in a Synagogue," where two older friends are going around a synagogue discussing the best place to hide if there were an active shooter.  Morbid.  But then this happens more and more these days.  Just sad.

In "The Elevator" a young woman is alone in an elevator with a strange man when he then comments how he could rape her, gropes her, then disappears.  She is absolutely terrified to ever ride in an elevator alone with a man after that.  One day she gets stuck in an elevator alone with a man again and panics when it breaks down.

In "Three Interviews," a middle aged women is desperate for a job.  She has three interviews lined up that day, and each interview becomes weirder than the last.  It was just a weird story.

A woman is campaigning for office in "Mrs America," and it's tearing her family apart.

This is not mentioning every story in the book, just some of them. 

I thought the best story in the book was "The Department of Happiness and Reimbursement."  This takes you into another world, where many don't have jobs, and the few that do work very long hours and are not always treated well.  The main character works at an office that takes complaints from workers and sends them the reimbursements.  This one story made me glad that I picked this book up, it was pretty good.