Manic by Lindsay Crook

Insert Bangles song

She's 28 and works at her town's only burger joint; it's Monday, and she's over it. She has a shitty job and a monotonous life, but she's going to do things her way this week. Lindsay once again delivers a top-notch tale. Completely relatable, funny, and wrong on so many levels. She never disappoints. If you aren't reading Lindsay, you are definitely missing out. Check it out on Godless. I promise you will not be disappointed. 5 severed fingers out of 5

Nothing like a bad week at work

I read Lindsay Crook's story Maniac earlier this week, and it was great! It was fun, and violent, which is two things I enjoy most in a story. Read about an angry girl at her crappy job and her over the top reactions to the douche bags she has to deal with!

They Really Had It Coming

Is there a more horrible occupational combination of thankless and stressful than working in fast food? Probably not. For the protagonist of Lindsay Crook's Manic, life at Bill's Burger Barn is one endless flow of disrespectful customers, sleazy bosses, and revolting working conditions. It's enough to drive anyone mad. But maybe, if her personal life weren't also in shambles, she could hold herself together past Wednesday. That's a big maybe, though. It's going to be a long week, but she's going to make it everyone else's problem if she has her way. One can hardly blame her when the universe seems to set things up just right. Crook is making poverty and impulse control issues sexy again. Wait, were those things ever sexy in the first place? I'm sure they were. I'm going to let it ride. Crook is bringing sexy back in a big way! Lindsay Crook fills these few pages with plenty of violence, biological warfare in the form of toxic food treatment, and even more violence. There's more than that, though. At the core, this is a story that showcases how unutterably awful life can be for women because, as much a caricature as Manic might be, it's probably not far off from the average week for altogether too many women. The world might be a better place if those women finally had enough, just like this protagonist did. Of course, it would be a better place if people just behaved better in the first place, but that might be asking a bit too much. Crook also manages to capture the stress and hopelessness that goes hand-in-hand with poverty-level existence and working demeaning, demoralizing jobs, only to barely make ends meet.

You think YOU need more time in the day…

Do you know what you need this morning? Brutal, vengeful, and gory. That’s how you wake up at 8 a.m. (It’s really early here.) A woman fed up with being taken advantage of at her fast food job, takes us through a week of her standing up for herself. Not everyone will survive … and that’s their fault. It’s 22 pages and $0.50! Get it at Godless.com 5/5 boss kebab skewers.

Speaking of Bipolar...

Things can be going fine for the longest time, and then you're triggered. It could be something big or it could be something small. But it sets the ball rolling, and from then on, you are more easily triggered. This is what happens when you have a hyper-manic episode. As a person with Type 1 Bipolar, I would say that there are some things the author captured very well, and others that she missed the ball on, but she got the overall sense of things. It seems to me, the protagonist was undiagnosed, didn't realize that she was acting irrationally, and she wasn't fazed by her reactions to what was happening to her. She had no filter. She did what she wanted, what seemed right in the moments and, and said what came to mind, without fear of reprocessions. I just hope that she gets the help and treatment she needs, because prison isn't the place for her. It will only make things worse, and if she were in her right mind, none of this would have happened. You know, blame the illness, not the person.