Erase Me(2012)

Margaret Atwood

In the latest edge-of-your-seat episode of "Positron," the Byliner Serial by renowned author Margaret Atwood, the dystopian dark comedy takes its darkest turn yet, pitting husband against wife and the human impulse to love against the animal instinct to survive.

Stan and Charmaine should have known better when they signed up for Consilience, a social experiment in which it’s the lawful who are locked up, while, beyond the gates, criminals wander the wasted streets of America.

The couple understand that to break the rules in so strictly regimented a place is dangerous; but, driven by boredom and lust, they do it anyway and betray each other and the system. As comeuppance, Stan finds himself the sexual plaything of a subversive member of the Consilience security team and in no time is made a pawn in a shadowy scheme to bring Consilience crashing down.

Meanwhile, his wife, Charmaine, is being held indefinitely at Positron Prison for her own sins. How far she’ll go to regain her good name and position is anyone’s guess, especially Stan’s. When he winds up paralyzed and tied to a gurney in the prison wing where Charmaine works, injecting toxic cocktails of drugs into troublesome Consilience citizens, will she save his neck or her own? Will she “erase” him permanently?

In "Erase Me," it’s every man—and woman—for him or herself. Erotically charged, morally complex, wickedly funny, and hailed as “shockingly believable” by "The Globe and Mail," Atwood’s "Positron" stories remind us that when a totalitarian state gets its grip on the human heart, marriage can be murder.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Atwood is the author of the internationally bestselling novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” as well as forty other books of fiction and nonfiction, including “The Blind Assassin,” “Oryx and Crake,” and “The Year of the Flood.” Her most recent collection of stories is “Moral Disorder.” She has written about utopias and dystopias in “In Other SF and the Human Imagination.” Atwood was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000 for “The Blind Assassin.”