“The early blots had been easy to identify. They were too handsome, for one thing.” (Out There by Kate Folk)
This is a story about indistinguishably lifelike robots released by criminals to lure people into relationships on dating apps and in real life, in order to gain access to their credit cards and bank accounts. Or is it? It has a very dry line of wit just below the surface and a lot about not knowing whether someone is real sounds suspiciously like normal life for a woman of a certain age looking for love. There’s a lot more to it than that. It’s terrifically enjoyable in a grim, somewhat hopeless way.
“Kate Folk is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.” (The New Yorker)
