The Revenge of the Senior Citizens ** Plus

by Kit Reed

16 short stories and one novella from the author of Fort Privilege.

Contents
Shan
Chicken Soup
Final Tribute
Into the Parlor
The Holdouts
Great Escape Tours, Inc.
Love Story
The Visible Partner
Frontiers
Dog Days
A Unique Service
Sisohpromatem
The Marriage Bug
Alumni Fund
The Revenge of the Senior Citizens
The Bride of Bigfoot
Hubbies: A Note

189 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1986

About the author

Kit Reed was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.

Her 2013 "best-of" collection, The Story Until Now, A Great Big Book of Stories was a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nominee. A Guggenheim fellow, she was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she served as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of sixteen short stories and the titular novella, most of which are fantasy or purely sociological science fiction. About half of them first appeared in genre digests (New Worlds, Twilight Zone, Asimov's, & F & SF), and the rest are curiously original to this volume, which seems to have never had another edition. It's a rather uneven group, and many of the stories seem to just strike a mood or elicit a chuckle without really going anywhere, though they're very literate and well-written. For example, the title novella concerns a group of elderly people who rebel at the fact of their age and stage a sit-in at their mall in Florida and then their situation gets worse... Chicken Soup is an excellent if uncomfortable Oedipal tale, perhaps the best in the book. Reed was a good early feminist writer, in the tradition of Margaret St. Clair and Zenna Henderson, who unfortunately never received the attention of some her peers like Tiptree or LeGuin.