The Cleansing – Anton Eine | Profoundness And Fun Combine In This Quirky Short Story

***This is a sponsored post but all thoughts are my own***

Author: Anton Eine
Genre: Sci-fi/short story
Published: 3rd February 2019

Synopsis

Advanced aliens have arrived to destroy any life on Earth and all the traces of our existence. Their mission is to wipe out any life in our Universe.
While unsuspecting humankind is not aware of deadly menace, alien invaders analyze intelligence information and get ready to initiate the cleansing protocol. Suddenly some of the data gathered disturbs those powerful unimpassioned aliens.
Will beauty save the world? Not this time… 
This sci-fi short story gives us a view of our world from perspective of alien invaders that just arrived to destroy any life on Earth. Can we do anything to save our fragile peace, to protect our home and the very existence of the humankind?
(Taken from Anton Eine’s website and Goodreads)

My Review

I don’t often read short stories, though reflecting on that I’m not entirely sure why that is. I usually really enjoy them – there’s something about a short story that’s so contrasting to a novel, and it needs different devices and features to work. What really drew me in to The Cleansing by Anton Eine is that it’s very transparent with this, completely breaking the rules to deliver something really quite unique.

The Cleansing is written entirely in dialogue, without even a simple dialogue tag in sight. The dialogue comes from several characters, an intelligent alien race humans haven’t yet come into contact with, and we know only their ranks on board their ship as they observe us from our multitude of ‘records’ we have stored. Because of this unusual style there is little character development but it isn’t actually needed – the characters are interesting to follow through their conversations even if we know nothing about them.

Eine’s storytelling is strong, somehow managing to get across so much with no narrative description. Seeing our race from an outside perspective is really quite interesting and the story, though short, explores themes such as philosophy and our way of living. It’s existential and futuristic, giving the reader something to ponder over their cup of tea and biscuits. It’s got a great sense of underlying humour, too – once you’ve twigged what the aliens are observing then it suddenly feels quite clever.

Final Thoughts

At 99p The Cleansing is well-worth the money and, given that it’s only 18 pages long, is a nice little ebook to enjoy during your downtime, perhaps in between heavier writing. Eine’s original writing style certainly lends to the concept of “less is more”, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his short stories in future.

Purchase Links

If you’d like to purchase The Cleansing for just 99p then you can do so here:

The Cleansing by Anton Eine – Amazon UK
The Cleansing by Anton Eine – Amazon US

Author Bio

Anton Eine is sci-fi and technofantasy author from Kyiv, Ukraine.
After building his successful career in marketing, he decided to let his creativity writing fantastic fiction books to actualize numerous ideas he had in his mind for years.
Anton is passionate about food (and some drinks of course!), photography, animals (especially wild cats) and rock music. He likes embedding his hobbies into the fantastic canvas of his writings and to share that passion with readers.
Anton Eine officially can’t stand any limits and boundaries, so his books usually step out of the box of traditional genres, crossing the edges of conventional storytelling and blurring the borders of common thinking.
Author of superhero series “Maze City” and technomancy series “Programagic”, also known for short sci-fi stories “The Cleansing”, “Sincerely Yours, Lucifer”, “Plus Ten”, “Post-molecular Comfort Food” and others.
(Taken from Anton Eine’s website)

Do you enjoy experimental fiction? If you liked this review please like, pin, and leave a comment! You can also check my other recent book reviews here:
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Culture Smart! Colombia – Kate Cathey/Kuperard
Moxie – Alex Poppe