A Clean Escape

by John Kessel

In the privacy of her office, a psychiatrist torments a man suffering from a faulty memory. Or does she? When treatment becomes a struggle for power, who can separate reality from illusion, lies from truth, sanity from insanity, guilt from innocence? And what is at stake in the world outside the room?

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories

Audiobook

Published December 6, 2019

About the author

John (Joseph Vincent) Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards, his books include Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories. His story collection Meeting in Infinity was a New York Times Notable Book. Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he has edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, The Secret History of Science Fiction and Kafkaesque. Born in Buffalo, NY, Kessel has a PhD in American Literature, has been an NEA Fellow, and for twenty years has been one of the organizers of the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[Adam]

*Read as part of the "Masterpieces The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century" by Orson Scott Card*

I think this story would benefit from rereading; I wasn’t overly fond of it at first glance. However the synopsis is interesting. A man with retrograde amnesia wakes up every day to see a shrink who attempts to make him confront the truth. And what a ‘bombshell’ that truth turns out to be yuk yuk yuk.

[mark propp]

ok, that was a hell of a story. great. morbid, sad, almost a little funny. pairs nicely with the book on nuclear war by annie jacobsen i read a month or so back. will also make you think of memento.

a downer, for sure.

i will forget most of the stories in this collection. won't forget this one.

[Aiden McKinney]

A very depressing story, but one that effectively challenges morality and identity by stripping away your later actions and ostensibly reversing time to before a tragic decision was made, allowing for the body of the man who killed the world to be the vessel, but also allowing the mind innocence. A pradox of the human experience delivered in twelve pages.