Aphelion

Sorry, couldn't dig it. This whole thing had a strong sense of forced phoniness to it in the way Rob's character was portrayed. Such professed love for his family is jarringly incongruous with the level of fear he has of them. To a lesser extent, his fear -- both of his family and of the stranger -- is incongruous with his habit of keeping himself in good physical shape; a strong, fit man is a more confident man.

Worse, I expected a fight and didn't get one; that would have been better. And I still don't understand why he'd be afraid to use the upstairs light switch.

At least it was free of the spelling/grammar/punctuation errors we find here and there.

Lester Curtis wrote:Sorry, couldn't dig it. This whole thing had a strong sense of forced phoniness to it in the way Rob's character was portrayed. Such professed love for his family is jarringly incongruous with the level of fear he has of them. To a lesser extent, his fear -- both of his family and of the stranger -- is incongruous with his habit of keeping himself in good physical shape; a strong, fit man is a more confident man.

Worse, I expected a fight and didn't get one; that would have been better. And I still don't understand why he'd be afraid to use the upstairs light switch.

At least it was free of the spelling/grammar/punctuation errors we find here and there.

Rob suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which is related to anxiety and depression. (For a funny / sad depiction of this, see Jack Nicholson's character in "As Good As It Gets" -- in some ways brash, rude, arrogant, but compelled to do things like lock and unlock his door several times (an exact NUMBER of times), almost physically incapable of stepping on a crack (which makes crossing a tile floor extremely challenging)... See also Tony Shalhoub's character in the TV series "Monk" -- brilliant, but germophobic, compelled to do things like touch every lamppost when he walks down the street, rearrange any objects that are not perfectly aligned or sorted by color, size, etc.) Intelligence, physical prowess, special skills -- all become irrelevant when an OCD compulsion comes into play.

I hadn't noticed the OCD thing -- had to go back and look again. It's mentioned, but not much.

Seems to me the OCD is just randomly thrown in and has no real place in the story. It had nothing to do with the conflict, near as I could tell. Or is the whole story about some esoteric aspect or manifestation of OCD?