The Death Trip [Kindle Edition]

Marion Stein (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The Simulated Life Elapsed Process aka The Death Trip is touted as a pharmaceutical alternative to end of life pain and suffering -- a dream state that makes the user's last minutes feel like years spent living the perfect existence. But is this one-way ride really the paradise promised by Panacium Inc?

The Death Trip "comfort care for the dying" or something more nefarious? Some say there's even a link to the newest party drug.

After the death of his beloved grandmother, Chuck decides to investigate and soon finds himself torn between two women -- the activist who suspects a dark agenda and the beautiful MD who helped create the process

The Death Trip, is a quick-read novella, around 20k words or approximately 80 book-sized pages, written by Marion Stein, the author of Loisaida -- A New York Story.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 175 KB
• Publisher: Caradeloca Press (November 18, 2009)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002XULHAW
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,566 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #14 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Technothrillers

More About the Author

Marion Stein is a native New Yorker who returned to her hometown in September 2001 after living many other places including Burlington, Vermont, Oaxaca, Mexico and Seattle, Washington. She has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence as well as an MSW from Hunter College. Marion's careers have included crisis clinician, teacher, tarot card reader, grant writer and temp. Her story Pogo was published in Gordon Lish's literary magazine, The Quarterly. More recently she has been involved with The Storytelling Circle at Narativ and was a featured storyteller on a WBAI radio broadcast. Her novel, Hungry Ghosts was shortlisted for the 2009 International 3-Day Novel Contest.

Marion has two books currently available on Amazon Kindle, The Death Trip and Loisaida -- A New York Story. Loisaida is also available in paperback.

You can visit Marion and find out more on her blog, http://www.marionstein.net or publisher at http://www.caradelocapress.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great premise, good writing, unfortunate ending, September 7, 2010

By 

Susan Bennett "Susan Wells Bennett, novelist" (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Death Trip (Kindle Edition)

I was prepared to love this story, but unfortunately, it let me down. The ending was too sudden and too ambiguous for me.

The good:

The premise of this story is great: a drug that lets the terminally ill have a fantastic end-of-life experience is being tested. The main character's grandmother volunteers to be a guinea pig in the experiment, thereby willingly forfeiting the remainder of her life. The main character, a writer, seeks to learn more about the way his grandmother chose to die.

Overall, the writing is good. There were a few typos, but that's normal even in publishing-house novels these days. Apparently, no one can afford a good editor.

The bad:

As I said before, the ending feels rushed, almost as if the author got tired of writing the story and decided to end it right where he was.

That said, I'm not sorry I read it. It was entertaining. I hope to see more from this author.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good short story, December 11, 2009

By 

Stacy L. Daniels (Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Death Trip (Kindle Edition)

The Death Trip was a quick read and the story was surprisingly well done for such a short length. It did contain a few errors, but not very many. Chuck, an out of work aspiring journalist, originally starts researching the company behind the Death Trip experience to better understand his grandmother's choice to take the drug instead of living out the remaining few months of her life with cancer and Parkinsons disease. He is drawn to a mysterious women he meets online who suspects the company of evil intentions and wants him to gather the evidence to prove it. As he digs deeper, he raises the suspicions of the company's founder, who has a hidden agenda. The author takes a very controversial subject and presents the perspective from each side. The science behind the death trip experience was explained very well and was thought-provoking. The ending was a surprise and left up to interpretation.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good "thinking" SciFi, December 26, 2010

By 

Dragi Raos "bnz" (Zagreb, Croatia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Death Trip (Kindle Edition)

The first half of this story reads like an early Greg Egan, posing questions on topic ranging from the nature of our experiences, ethics of euthanasia to politics of drug control. Despite some part of exposition being somewhat flat, mostly delivered through monologues, the reader does get drawn into considering those problems*. The end, sadly, devolves into a plain vanilla cloak and dagger story of megalomania and corporate greed, but does leave the protagonist, and the reader with him, with a tough if a touch contrived dilemma at the end.

Unlike some other reviewers, I did not have problems with pacing of the narrative. The plot does hinge too much on coincidences, but the characters are believable, reasonably well developed within the confines of the short form, and mostly free from stereotypes.

I certainly hope Ms. Stein will provide us with a full length collection of works in this vein soon.

*) As Edwin Schlossberg said, "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think."