My Review
The Remedy is the sixth installment in the Dark Corners series from Amazon Original Stories. So far, I have found I really enjoyed quite a few of these stories, and a few of them just weren’t really my thing.
Based on the kind of eerie cover this one has, along with the synopsis that seems kind of creepy and ominous, I was super excited to read this. It was short, measuring in at only 29 pages, so I was able to read it in a very short amount of time – pretty much like a half hour. I’ve really been into short stories lately because I have the ability to read them quickly. Since I enrolled my kiddos in cyber school two years ago, I don’t have as much free time to read as I used to, so these shorter stories just really fit with me lately.
“I’d tried so many doctors and therapists and healers of all kinds that I didn’t see the point of entering treatment with yet another. But a friend promised me this was different. Different altogether.”
The Remedy starts off with our main character, Derrick, talking about how they are suffering from a psychological condition. He doesn’t quite say what it is (and I will talk more about this later), but you can pretty much guess from the way he talks more about it later in the story. Anyway, his friend recommends this clinic that promises a new kind of therapy to help improve these kinds of conditions. It promises to cure you within just a few sessions. And Derrick’s friend seems to have made significant progress with his treatment. So Derrick is eager to give it a go.
The only catch? The initial visit is $20,000. Subsequent visits are $15,000 each.
“It was as if my experience with Dr. Lang was granting me, in a way I had never known before, something like independence, even distance from the people I’d be intimate with the longest. And there came with that a certain unaccountable peace.”
So after the first visit to this incredibly strange clinic, he decides that he wants to continue his visits and see what the treatment is all about. After all, after the consultation alone he finds himself feeling a lot better, so how much better could he actually wind up feeling if he continued with the program?
So he goes back.
And the second visit is even stranger than the one before it.
In fact, he is about to find out what the real cure is.
Okay, so, like I said before, the premise for The Remedy is awesome. I thought it was going to have so many elements that I love in a short story, so many elements that would bring this story together and make me longing for more.
But to be honest, it fell really short for me.
For one, I didn’t connect with the main character. At all. Not even in the slightest. In fact, I couldn’t even remember the character’s name, so I had to look it up a few times.
Also, this story was just so…vague. So many things that should have been revealed in the story just weren’t even touched upon after the initial mention of it, and I ended up with so many more questions than I started with. I feel like the description of the story had more of a story to it than the actual story itself.
Also, the ending was just…what. I don’t want to give it away, but I just didn’t really like the ending at all. It was twisty, that’s for sure. I mean, I didn’t see it coming at all – I kind of thought it was going to end in an entirely different way. So I mean, I’m pretty glad that I was wrong, but I just didn’t like the turn it took.
I think what really bothered me most was how vague this one was. I like answers when I’m reading. Maybe you are a different kind of reader than I am and can appreciate a story that doesn’t give you all the details, and that’s okay. This book might be a good read for you, then, and I hope so!
