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The Interview
Damian Bruce, author
In a city racked by poverty and discontent, twelve people arrive for an interview with the all powerful Frontline Corporation. The successful candidate will trade hunger and hardship for a life of luxury and excess. However, it quickly becomes clear that The Interview is nothing like they expected.
Who will survive the brutal waiting game that unfolds? To what lengths are the candidates willing to go to secure the job? And what secrets are they hiding from one another?
The Interview is an expansive novel told in separate narrative threads, the first focusing on the events in the claustrophobic Interview room and the second going outside into the wider city where its citizens are being crushed under a brutal regime but where reform might just be on the horizon
Reviews
Set in 2098, Bruce’s dystopian thriller is an interesting variant on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, though it would have packed more of a punch if the characters were more fleshed out. An everyman figure, Edgar Mason has received a much-sought-for invitation for an interview at Frontline, which, in a grim city of the future, is “everything—employer, provider, governor, ruler. Oppressor?” A job with Frontline offers Edgar the hope for a better life, but when he reaches the waiting room, he finds 11 other prospects, all with similar aspirations. After they wait impatiently for an hour, they are informed that the waiting time was itself part of the process, and that anyone leaving the room, as an impatient member of their group already has done, would be eliminated. The last of the remaining 10 in the room will get the position, setting up a desperate physical and mental struggle among the interviewees. Bruce tosses in surprises throughout, but the moral questions Edgar and the others confront aren’t explored with any depth. (BookLife)
