Click Here To Purchase From Amazon The Pact Beneath the Bridge

Title: The Pact Beneath the Bridge

Author: Valbona Kociu

ISBN: 1432701029

Albanian author Valbona Kociu’s short story The Pact Beneath the Bridge has a quality that could effortlessly be considered poetic with its brevity as well as the associated compression and unencumbered intensity of its language. At its heart, the first person narrative focuses on a life-altering event involving twenty-nine year old Steven Won, whose life is suspended, as he is incarcerated in a London prison cell waiting the court’s verdict pertaining to his alleged premeditated murder of his girlfriend Antoinette Dermen.

It seems that on a rainy autumn day Steven was walking with Antoinette and when they paused on a bridge, his girlfriend informed him that their relationship was over. Steven couldn’t believe what ensued next as Antoinette strolled away. His hand reached for her leg and in the next moment he witnessed a terrifying scene as her body disappeared while he remained frozen, waiting for the arrival of the police.

From here Kociu plunges us into the mind of Won as he claims that every night a ghost calls on him in his eight-square meter cell tormenting him and even making love to him. Won shows his disdain by his loud screams that bring about his ridicule by the other prisoners who think he is gone mad.    

The narrative proceeds allowing Kociu some leeway as she keeps propelling it forward with a series of chilling and inexplicable events that leave some elements distressingly unresolved, but it is this gap and absence that makes the story so gripping.

A glass of water is mysteriously placed on a table in Steven’s cell. Then there is the breaking of the glass as it falls from Steven’s hands scattering pieces everywhere. A note is left on Steven’s bed asking him if he knew the purpose of the shards of glass on the floor. Another note is left on the guard’s chair stating that in cell number 11, which is Steven’s cell, “someone is trying to commit suicide.” What a joke!” And after his attempted suicide, while recovering in a hospital, Steven once again is visited by this same ghost who tells him that if he wants to get away from her he must call himself crazy and give her his soul. Moreover, she tells him that she will leave if he “promises to remember the pact.”

The strength of Kociu’s writing lies in the purposeful ambiguity she reveals in the mind of Steven, who must grapple with the demon that haunts him as well as the degree to which his problem is self-inflicted or imagined. Overall, The Pact Beneath the Bridge is well paced and readable, memorable for its sinister and ominous elements that perhaps will cause readers to emerge battered after its reading, yet in the end this compelling and highly original story works.

To read Norm's Interview With Valbona Kociu CLICK HERE

The above review was contributed by: Norm Goldman, B.A. LL.L, Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com. Norm is a retired Title Attorney and is now a travel writer. Together with his artist wife, Lily, the couple meld Norm's words with Lily's art. To check out their travel site click on Sketchandtravel.com   Click here to view Norm’s Reviews & Interviews.

Click Here To Purchase From Amazon The Pact Beneath the Bridge