Strange Horizons, September 1, 2014

“Four Steps to the Perfect Smoky Eye” by Claire Humphrey

Reviewed by Stevie Barry

Claire Humprhey‘s “Four Steps to the Perfect Smoky Eye” is, at its root, a story about child abuse. An overbearing father fits his teenage daughter with a ‘safekeeper’, a device designed to alert him if any physical harm comes to her. The excuse given is that there is a serial killer at large whose specific target is teenage girls, but the father simply uses it as another means of controlling his daughter.

While any tale involving child abuse is inevitably tragic, this one falls flat in several ways. The father is a cliché: he ticks almost every box for the archetype of an emotionally sadistic parent, and appears to have no other defining features. While the story is told through the eyes of his abused daughter, who would have little cause to think of him as anything but a villain, his effectiveness as an antagonist is dulled by the fact that he’s such a formulaic character.

The only real science fiction element of the story, the safekeeper, is under-utilized. It’s an interesting little piece of technology, functioning as a combination of panic button and taser, but its role in the story is reduced to a metaphorical handcuff. (It’s even described as a handcuff, in case the reader can’t spot the metaphor.)