Review: “And Yet” by A.T. Greenblatt

Release Date: March/April, 2018, issue 21
Publisher: Uncanny Magazine
Genre: Supernatural

My Thoughts

Written in present tense, second person POV, And Yet follows you, a theoretical physicist, through your journey into a haunted house. With a brand, spanking new Ph.D and a hefty research grant waiting, our narrator is ready to revisit the place that altered their life…literally. Our narrator escaped that house a changed person, but so too was the world. Tragically, their brother Avery was severely injured in a car accident and died a few years later. But the narrator has a theory, one they’re determined to prove, no matter the cost. They believe the house isn’t just haunted, but a concentration of parallel universes. Which is why, years later, they’re back at that house. If they can prove the existence of parallel universes, their career will skyrocket. And maybe, just maybe, they can turn the bad things from their past into good.

Once in the house, the narrator struggles to keep their focus. Research is difficult to concentrate on when every choice they ever made and every consequence they ever suffered is thrust in front of them. The house doesn’t like visitors, and seems to take a perverse glee in punishing those who return. Through the narrator, Greenblat asks what you would do if you had the chance to change your life but the cost was giving up everything you worked so hard for? Would your answer be different if you didn’t know if the change would improve your life or make it worse?

As a pleasant surprise, the narrator is also disabled – they walk with leg braces and a cane. I didn’t know that going in, but I’m glad Greenblat made that choice. The narrator has complicated feelings about their disability, but it’s never made to feel like a flaw. This is who they are, and they manage just fine, thank you very much.

This was my first time reading something by A.T. Greenblat, but it won’t be the last. In just a few thousand words, Greenblat deftly wove an intricate study of trauma and abuse into a horror-tinged science fiction story about alternate realities.

Read the full story online.

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