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Fort Privilege
Conjures up a future where control of New York City has passed from the wealthy to the poor, the criminal, and the dispossessed and where Bart Cavanaugh and hundreds of others are held captive at the Parkhurst
- GenresHorrorScience Fiction
186 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 19, 1985
100 people want to read
About the author
Kit Reed
192 books53 followersKit Reed was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.
Her 2013 "best-of" collection, The Story Until Now, A Great Big Book of Stories was a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nominee. A Guggenheim fellow, she was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she served as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.
Her 2013 "best-of" collection, The Story Until Now, A Great Big Book of Stories was a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nominee. A Guggenheim fellow, she was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she served as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 7, 2017
Quasi-sci-fi novel about rich New Yorkers isolating themselves in a giant luxury apartment building and fighting off the poors who want to get inside and put their poverty slime all over their nice furniture and daughters and stuff. So it's basically slice-of-life contemporary realism.
August 26, 2015
FORT PRIVILEGE is a riveting page-turner! It is set in a near-future dystopia: a New York City, from which the middle-class, the working poor—as well as the overwhelmed police--have fled. “Scavengers and opportunists, the lawless, the violent and the pathological” (1) have taken over the city in such numbers that the U.S. government has abandoned it. Wealthy aristocrat, Abel Parkhurst, prepares to celebrate his gated community’s hundredth anniversary. Though, naively sure that no rabble can penetrate its defenses, Abel is forced to protect the Parkhurst, not only from the mindless brutes outside, but also from a determined spy inside.
As the title suggests, FORT PRIVILEGE depicts a future in which the poor have become ever more are vicious and desperate, while the rich have (to quote THE GREAT GATSBY) “retreated back into their money.” Because this trend toward social polarization has accelerated alarmingly in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I wanted SOME recognition that the rabble besieging the Parkhurst might have legitimate grievances. However, the rebel leaders are merely vicious brutes, their followers a faceless mob. They mutilate the corpses of escaping Parkhurst residents, leaving them as warnings. Alas, most of Reed’s aristocrats are equally self-interested sociopaths. Wealthy playboy, Ted Beckett (who has assumed the title “General”) uses an improvised catapult to bombard the enemy with the bodies of the Parkhurst wounded. The U.S. government and military (when we meet them) are mired in bureaucracy and turf-wars.
The protagonist, Bart, was a childhood friend of Sarah, Abel Parkhurst’s daughter. In the powerful opening chapter, Bart fights his way to the Parkhurst through cars, fleeing the city: “the drivers . . .kept their windows rolled up and shook fists at Bart as he scrambled over their hoods. They crouched with embattled looks, while passengers with blunt instruments kept watch on all sides. . . . . Every car he saw on the East Side was headed out of town” (6). After his girlfriend, Mardella, died, Bart was confined to a mental hospital. His treatment left Bart with partial amnesia, as well as blind spots that make reading impossible. Rising to the role of defender, Bart overcomes a disability that is either the result of botched therapy or a cruel punishment.
The other heroes--the patriarch Abel Parkhurst and a small group of partygoers and servants--are genuinely engaging. Frail but intensely idealistic about the Parkhurst community he inherited, Abel inspires the others to “keep going” in “terrible times” (121). Defending the Parkhurst, Bart and Abel are joined by Colonel Brody, a cool-headed survivor who was publically shamed by a romantic obsession. A recently divorced doctor who is fighting alcoholism, Regan tirelessly ministers to the wounded. One of the most sympathetic defenders is a small boy, Archer. Greedy and spoiled at the outset, Archer is (rather unrealistically) traumatized into speechlessness after he being briefly captured by the leaders of the barbarians. Unable to talk, Archer struggles to tell the defenders the identity of the spy, attaching messages to the legs of pigeons in an effort to bring help. Disgraced or damaged in some fashion, each defender must overcome his or her personal demon.
While I thoroughly enjoyed reading myself to sleep with FORT PRIVILEGE, I was troubled by its implied ideology. In an uncomfortably Ayn Randish manner, Reed celebrates a small number of individuals, who are almost a different species from the ignorant, self-interested Yahoos that surround and threaten them.
As the title suggests, FORT PRIVILEGE depicts a future in which the poor have become ever more are vicious and desperate, while the rich have (to quote THE GREAT GATSBY) “retreated back into their money.” Because this trend toward social polarization has accelerated alarmingly in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I wanted SOME recognition that the rabble besieging the Parkhurst might have legitimate grievances. However, the rebel leaders are merely vicious brutes, their followers a faceless mob. They mutilate the corpses of escaping Parkhurst residents, leaving them as warnings. Alas, most of Reed’s aristocrats are equally self-interested sociopaths. Wealthy playboy, Ted Beckett (who has assumed the title “General”) uses an improvised catapult to bombard the enemy with the bodies of the Parkhurst wounded. The U.S. government and military (when we meet them) are mired in bureaucracy and turf-wars.
The protagonist, Bart, was a childhood friend of Sarah, Abel Parkhurst’s daughter. In the powerful opening chapter, Bart fights his way to the Parkhurst through cars, fleeing the city: “the drivers . . .kept their windows rolled up and shook fists at Bart as he scrambled over their hoods. They crouched with embattled looks, while passengers with blunt instruments kept watch on all sides. . . . . Every car he saw on the East Side was headed out of town” (6). After his girlfriend, Mardella, died, Bart was confined to a mental hospital. His treatment left Bart with partial amnesia, as well as blind spots that make reading impossible. Rising to the role of defender, Bart overcomes a disability that is either the result of botched therapy or a cruel punishment.
The other heroes--the patriarch Abel Parkhurst and a small group of partygoers and servants--are genuinely engaging. Frail but intensely idealistic about the Parkhurst community he inherited, Abel inspires the others to “keep going” in “terrible times” (121). Defending the Parkhurst, Bart and Abel are joined by Colonel Brody, a cool-headed survivor who was publically shamed by a romantic obsession. A recently divorced doctor who is fighting alcoholism, Regan tirelessly ministers to the wounded. One of the most sympathetic defenders is a small boy, Archer. Greedy and spoiled at the outset, Archer is (rather unrealistically) traumatized into speechlessness after he being briefly captured by the leaders of the barbarians. Unable to talk, Archer struggles to tell the defenders the identity of the spy, attaching messages to the legs of pigeons in an effort to bring help. Disgraced or damaged in some fashion, each defender must overcome his or her personal demon.
While I thoroughly enjoyed reading myself to sleep with FORT PRIVILEGE, I was troubled by its implied ideology. In an uncomfortably Ayn Randish manner, Reed celebrates a small number of individuals, who are almost a different species from the ignorant, self-interested Yahoos that surround and threaten them.
December 12, 2021
Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
"Kit Reed’s short fiction cuts and sears and cauterizes. The themes she explores in short work forms a laundry list of Joachim Boaz favorites–paranoia, post-apocalyptic landscapes, youth gangs, dislocation, drugged cities, mechanical toys, sinister retirement communities, rural ritual, and the power of media. Check out my review of Reed’s collection Mister Da V. and Other Stories (1967) for a demonstration of her talents. Her novels have proved a bit more hit and miss. I enjoyed her antiwar fable Armed Camps (1969)–“all about characters constructing narratives and conjuring visions in order to keep the aphotic tides of societal disintegration at bay”–but I found Magic Time (1980), while an occasionally humorous [...]"
"Kit Reed’s short fiction cuts and sears and cauterizes. The themes she explores in short work forms a laundry list of Joachim Boaz favorites–paranoia, post-apocalyptic landscapes, youth gangs, dislocation, drugged cities, mechanical toys, sinister retirement communities, rural ritual, and the power of media. Check out my review of Reed’s collection Mister Da V. and Other Stories (1967) for a demonstration of her talents. Her novels have proved a bit more hit and miss. I enjoyed her antiwar fable Armed Camps (1969)–“all about characters constructing narratives and conjuring visions in order to keep the aphotic tides of societal disintegration at bay”–but I found Magic Time (1980), while an occasionally humorous [...]"
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August 18, 2007Do not want.
May 28, 2024
I only knew of this book because of Grady Hendrix’s Paperbracks from Hell which this was listed in. It takes a little bit to get into as I felt bombarded by so many different characters being introduced right away. Once I was about 40 pages in I was able to kind of settle in. The story doesn’t quite go where you think and the ending is rather abrupt while also not satisfying me. The writing was decent but it also didn’t really have any violence or horror I was expecting from an 80s pulp horror paperback. If I could I’d probably rate it a two and a half but I rounded up to 3 because it wasn’t long and still somewhat entertained me
December 15, 2023
A garish hodgepodge from Paperbacks from Hell.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews