Wilbur is married to Sarah. They live a quiet life in an American town. Wilbur goes to work. He comes home. The couple don’t really speak very much any more. They’ve settled into a routine and, although it may not be exactly how he’d imagined his life might turn out, Wilbur drifts along with his head down and decades of passive drudgery in front of him. One day he returns from work and finds that a mysterious crate has been delivered to his house. It’s huge and heavy and the exterior is marked with strange symbols. Sarah doesn’t know how it got into the basement. Wilbur is certain it has been delivered in error. Reluctantly he opens the crate to see what’s inside.
THE DELIVERY is a short novella from the prolific and accomplished author K.M. Halpern who has previously published two collections of very short stories, The Man Who Stands in Line and The Way Around. The premise of this book is equally as quirky as the subject matters of his shorter works. Though the story is a distant cousin of the Stephen King horror classic The Crate, the object that Wilbur discovers in THE DELIVERY is not as literal a monster (though it is potentially more dangerous). A much closer relative is Richard Matheson’s Button, Button in which the protagonist is delivered a clear, if unwanted, moral dilemma in the form of an apparently lethal box. Halpern’s horror comes in the Kafkaesque trials that Wilbur faces in trying to return the crate and the already present fractures in his relationships that the unwanted delivery reveal. At one point Wilbur ponders on whether things would have been better in his marriage if they had had a child and it’s not too much of a stretch to see “the delivery” as the metaphorical baby that may have changed everything.
Though the initial premise is intriguing the book slightly runs out of steam before the end. Halpern’s dialogue is witty and filled with wordplay echoing some of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter’s lyrical conundrums. Elsewhere though, particularly in Wilbur’s inner monologue, there is a tendency for infuriatingly aimless deviation that delay any action without revealing very much in the way of character motivation or world building. In essence THE DELIVERY is an absurdist short story which never quite justifies its stretch to novella length.
THE DELIVERY is a quick and quirky read blending the horrors of bureaucracy with the pressures of conformity.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader