Rating: 
Summary: a delicious antidote for academic bile
Review: When I went to see my doctor about stress-related problems I was having after the head of my graduate committee tried to have me expelled for writing a paper she disagreed with, the doctor prescribed this book. It ranks with the best medical advice I've ever got. I've recommended this book to dozens of people - one of whom seems to have borrowed my copy and taken it with him to a post-doc position... I don't have the heart to ask for it back, as I think he'll need it, so I'm ordering a new one for myself. And I can't wait until "The Lecturer's Tale" comes out in paperback. Other reviewers have mentioned that Hyne's work isn't very realistic; that's true, and I see this as a strength. This is fiction of the absurd. In each novella, unscrupulous wielders of some measure of academic power meet very strange, and strangely apt, retribution. If you've ever suffered at the hands of academia, these oddly appropriate, dark fantasias of justice may be as appealing (and healing) to you as they are to me. I do think that the "terror" of the tales may be dependent on the reader having academic experience; maybe even, more specifically, academic experience in the era of postmodernism and in a field that takes postmodernism seriously. Chemists at land-grant universities, for instance, may not find them as chillingly germane as literature theorists in the Ivy league, although I'd guess that all of the above and more will enjoy them. I'd have to agree with other reviewers that the plots are fairly transparent. The middle story, in particular, is predictable. But I think the appeal here is not that you can't guess what's going to happen, but rather that you *can*, and that you just can't wait.
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