I've been ready for this! As something to begin after my favorite holiday ends and the midterm election stuff comes to a head, I'm participating in the Margaret Atwood Reading Month hosted by Marcie at BuriedinPrint and Naomi at Consumed by Ink. Thank you, ladies!
Total Spoilers Ahead:
Tonight's read was The Freeze-Dried Groom which was chilling (bad pun, I am aware).
We meet Sam, a dealer of used furniture and all-around peach of a guy, just as his wife is kicking him out of (her) house and as his car will not start. Sam has a habit of imagining his own crime scenes- ones in which he is the victim. He spends a lot of time thinking about the witness statements surrounding his disappearance/death, the sexy coroner examining his corpse, etc.
What Sam DOES encounter is an auctioned-off storage unit in which a wedding has been staged, complete with a frozen, former groom. And then the bride shows up.
This "black widow" tries to bargain with Sam, but he takes this as a whole new challenge and he begins to make demands.
The ending is vague. I choose to believe she got him in the end.
I just read that there was a contest on Wattpad for fans to continue the story!
That's pretty cool.
Is this a typical Atwood story? I need to read more to find out. There is a mystical element to the whole tale with the polar vortex. Already, we've been warned the storm is causing cars to stop working and airports to shut down. It is likely that Sam will be trapped at the motel with the Black Widow. Similar to the way that her groom is perpetually frozen at his own wedding in a storage locker? Interesting. Perhaps she has multiple storage lockers each filled with a macabre tableau? Hmm.
Or, you know, the drug dealer he was conning with took him out.
My only gripe was the text from Gwen "I was wrong, please come back". What? Why?
My guess is that we, the readers, needed something to prove just how committed Sam
was to seeing this thing through. Personally, I never doubted he was going to the motel, and was disappointed in Gwen for giving in when she was so determined to be free of
him. *shrug*
Overall, a great start to what's going to be a fun project!