overall 19 votes: 
editor average: 
Servicing the Pole is the portrait of a New York stripper—a battle-worn misfit slogging her way through the city’s roughest clubs, watching as the job replaces her personal life, and secretly harbouring rock star ambitions. As the fast-paced night life’s deceptive promises of easy money gradually give way to the harsher realities of addiction and prostitution, Emily must decide—is . . .
overall 6 votes:
editor rating:
Short stories, flash, contemporary, mainstream fiction for the attention-challenged reader. . . .
editor rating 1 vote:
Fate’s Janitors is a serialized web novel that takes the reader inside the mental health and addiction industry, the people who clean up after fate. A perennial student must complete a counseling internship at an outpatient mental health clinic. His supervisor, a recovering addict, and former outlaw biker, is less than thrilled about having an intern tagging along. The . . .
editor rating 1 vote:
Panflick is an online novel in the manner of Tom Jones. It deals with the limits of marriage, limits of family, limits of religion and limits of life. Its hero is Adam Panflick (1936 -). Irony, iconoclasm, a Terry Southern edge and a Kubrick sensibility suggest its general drift. . . .
editor rating 1 vote:
1963, and panic about the spread of heroin addiction in London. While scandals like the Profumo and Challenor cases are exposing the dark underbelly of post-war Britain, a teenage heroin and cocaine addict undergoes a cold turkey. His escape from custody triggers a chain of events which ends in murder and mayhem. . . .
editor rating 1 vote:
Liz Bahti wakes up half-dead from her latest alcoholic binge and declares it will be her last. She discovers that it’s not as easy as moving two thousand miles, shaving her head and rebuilding old friendships. Stalked by demons both human and mental, she learns that there’s just one crucial question she needs to answer: does she think she’s worth . . .
editor rating 1 vote:
LITMUS isn’t sure what he thinks about people, but science—that is an affair capable of sustaining him indefinitely. There’s only one problem, he’s already dead. Everybody is. “Not dead,” corrects Mace. “Almost dead, it’s a different thing altogether. Plucked from the edge and thrown back into life. Shouldn’t you be working?” Near fatal accidents, intentional incidents with electrical . . .
What first drew me into Servicing the Pole was the quick, succinct voice of the character. It is written in first person present tense—something that usually bothers me—but I scarcely noticed it when I began to read.
Servicing the Pole isn’t a happy story—in fact, most of the time I found [more . . .]
I like grey and gritty stories, and this is an excellent one. Lauri describes the life of an exotic dancer, with honesty, no self-pity, and with a strange detachment which I recognize from having had acquaintances who were sex workers. It explores with eyes wide open the fine line between pole/lap dancing and prostitution in the mind of the [more . . .]