SMALL TOWN U.S.A. BY WAY OF ROD SERLING AND DAVID LYNCH: JON BASSOFF'S THE MEMORY WARD

Like his friend Gabino Iglesias, Jon Bassoff is one of the masters at mixing genres. He fuses crime, thriller, horror, and at times science fiction. In his latest, The Memory Ward, part of the suspense comes from what genre if will fall into by the end.

He presents us with a Twilight Zone setup. Hank Davies, the mailman in the town of Bethlam, Nevada, discovers three of the letters he is carrying for different neighbors are blank. Other incidents mount, discovering his father, now suffering from dementia, acted in an eighties horror film, a woman who slices her own throat, and the townsfolk becoming armed. Hank wonders if it could be connected to Bethlam's history with the atomic age. His personal investigation leads him to a diary of a dead woman and other dark discoveries.

Basoff builds builds a strong sense of dread as Davies reaches the truth, step-by-step. With the diary he employs his much loved story within a story concept, employing a ticking clock to where he only has so much time to discover it and due to the writers actions, we have to question the reliability of the words. As each clue gets bigger, so does the threat to Hank, first to his life, then psyche.

Bassoff taps into the artificiality of our own society and how we interact with it. He then goes goes further to ask how much we depend on it to be more comfortable and happy and what we will do to keep it. You could say The Memory Ward holds up a funhouse mirror to our world, but the questions he raises are too sharp and clear for that definition.