Atwood's first short story in the Positron series blew me away. Unfortunately, whilst this episode was still enjoyable it just seemed like a filler or stop gap to the next step. It didn't leave you on tenterhooks like the last two. This may be because the main focus of this episode, Charmaine, didn't really invoke any sympathy in me. Nevertheless, it will be worth reading to see how the series ends. Like a 1950s sitcom set in a fractured future, Atwood presents a woman, empowered by her work and concomitantly bored by her marriage. Her work as Chief Medications Administrator has given her a God complex: I am in control. I am the light. I am the darkness. I am what I choose to be, dutiful but bored wife, or "sluttish blonde she herself wouldn't speak to if they were standing in a checkout line together." So, like Jocelyn and Stan, Charmaine is a double agent: slave to Consilience & her husband, and slave to her sexual persona & new boyfriend, Phil/ Max. This double life has made Charmaine neurotic, a Woody Allen with a needle in hand, ready to silence the stutterings of leftover wastrels. Stan is dead and so, too, is God/ Charmaine, merchant of her own destruction. "Erase Me," indeed.
Do You like book Erase Me (2012)?
Cannot wait for the next one loved it!!!!!
—slevin