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Cute Faustian fairy-tale, weakened by an anticlimactic ending.
I do like how it opens with someone exclaiming “I’d sell my soul for (person) to love me.” Up pops the Devil, and I thought “well, this story is certainly wasting no time.” Only then it segued to a different person exclaiming rhetorically about their willingness to sell their soul, and the Devil (apparently under legal obligation) popping up again.
By the third time it happens, the Devil is griping: “Why does everyone in this town keep trying to sell me their soul?! I’m running out of storage space! And the soul market is really weak this season!”
Apparently shadows are more desirable, and he buys one off some dude who is literally named Schlemiel, and who sounds like Peter Lorre (but isn’t, based on the rapid list of cast members at the end).
Anyway, 8 out of 10 – would have been higher but for the lack of a good punch line at the end of the twenty-odd-minute run time.
I do like how it opens with someone exclaiming “I’d sell my soul for (person) to love me.” Up pops the Devil, and I thought “well, this story is certainly wasting no time.” Only then it segued to a different person exclaiming rhetorically about their willingness to sell their soul, and the Devil (apparently under legal obligation) popping up again.
By the third time it happens, the Devil is griping: “Why does everyone in this town keep trying to sell me their soul?! I’m running out of storage space! And the soul market is really weak this season!”
Apparently shadows are more desirable, and he buys one off some dude who is literally named Schlemiel, and who sounds like Peter Lorre (but isn’t, based on the rapid list of cast members at the end).
Anyway, 8 out of 10 – would have been higher but for the lack of a good punch line at the end of the twenty-odd-minute run time.
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Date: 2018-09-11 06:51 am (UTC)From:Okay, wait, this is in dialogue with Adalbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl? (Who I know about because E.T.A. Hoffmann gives him a cameo in a story about a man who loses his reflection.)
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Date: 2018-09-11 12:02 pm (UTC)From:ETA -- different ending though. Personally, I believe if a character in a story escapes a deal with the literal Devil, it should be by means of a clever legal loophole, not just because they accidentally knock Fortunatus’ purse into the fireplace (I guess that purse came with an unusually generous manufacturer’s warranty).
(OK I guess if you play it as “somebody on the Other Team gave them a plausibly-deniable assist” it can work. But this just felt rushed.)