The Surprising Morality Questions of "Crime Suspenstories"

After we talked in class about Crime Suspensestories on Tuesday, and after examining the cover of the book, I was fully expecting to open it up and find horrible depictions of murder and torture. Instead, through the first three stories I found surprisingly tame storylines, with the majority of the interest or intrigue coming from the moral challenges faced by the protagonists of the story. In the first story, the son unknowingly commits his father to a life of paranoia, and himself to a life lived with the guilt of killing an innocent man. In the third story, a women is told she has months to live and hires a man to kill her, only to find out that the original prognosis is wrong. While maybe not pure questions of morality, these problems are at least troubling from a psychological perspective. I found these issues to be far more interesting than the overall storylines themselves, especially considering none of the first three had the particularly graphic or gruesome finish that would have really boosted the appeal of the overall story. I find it interesting that although Crime Suspensestories bills itself as having a gritty, nightmarish style, the subtle psychological undertones of the moral choices that have to be made are what really shines through. The intrigue is in fact lost when looking at a more graphic episode, such as "High Tide". Instead of being left with a moral cliffhanger that makes the reader think after closing the book, the ending--in which practically everyone is murdered--provides a far messier, and more shallow ending.