Book Review: Computer Love
Computer Love: A Digital Anthology. Ricardo Pierre-Louis. 2023.
Paperback, Kindle, Audiobook. 124 pages.
Reviewed by Megan J. Wheless.
While reading Ricardo Pierre-Louis’s collection of short stories titled Computer Love: A Digital Anthology, I was curious about how he would weave the themes of “love” and “loss” throughout each story. This collection offers a wide variety of short stories, from a child losing his mother and a bar owner seeking vengeance for a favorite customer to a man hospitalized due to his mental illness. The second half of the anthology, which reads more like a novella, includes a series of chapters that focus on the protagonist, Jamie, who is a painter, and his growing relationship with Eva, a female sex worker ten years his senior.
In other stories, Pierre-Louis places his characters in settings with a science fiction vibe, such as a gambler who must pay off his debts by stepping inside a rigged slot machine and a lion at a zoo that seems to have an otherworldly glow that only a child can see. A creative and daring attempt by the author to take his readers outside of the normal urban landscape begins within the first few stories of the anthology. While I appreciate Ricardo Pierre-Louis’s use of science fiction to enhance his stories’ themes and stretch the reader’s imagination, I found more descriptions are needed to make the science fiction elements fully portray the characters’ motivations to answer the central question at the heart of the anthology: “What happens when your world slips away and only love remains?”
The stories are varied in characters, setting, and concept. Each one attempts to answer this main question within each story. I appreciate how each character, regardless of age or gender, experiences loss and tries to find the meaning of his or her individual experiences, however, at times, switching points of view at critical plot points, can be confusing.
Ricardo Pierre-Louis explores deeply philosophical and very human themes in this collection. The storylines, the issues, the themes, and the characters’ lives in Computer Love: A Digital Anthology do matter.