David Duchovny

David Duchovny’s novella “The Reservoir” features the ultimate in social distancing. Ridley is an isolated man during the COVID-19 pandemic who, while compiling time-lapse photographs of New York City taken nightly from his Fifth Avenue apartment window, detects blinking lights in an apartment on the other side of the reservoir in Central Park, and imagines it to be an SOS signal. Ridley is divorced, estranged from his daughter, has retired young, and never leaves his apartment. With no guardrail of other people’s input to keep him from reacting to his imagined scenario, he sets out to connect with the tenant of the apartment across the reservoir. Readers accompany Ridley’s hallucinatory, now fevered mind through some very humorous and very dark encounters in Central Park, eventually into the waters of the reservoir itself. Well-written, alternatingly absurdly funny and piercingly sad, The Reservoir focuses on the need for connection, and the consequences of isolation.… (mere)

I am impressed with David Duchovny's descriptive writing style. The story, from the point of view of the main character Ridley, is set during the time of COVID-19 pandemic and takes you, if you lived alone, back to a time where you are constantly in your own thoughts and go for long periods of time without speaking to another person. As the story goes on its harder and harder to tell what is actually happening and what is happening within Ridley's mind. This story is well written and highly recommended. (I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest reveiw).… (mere)