‘A Slumlord’s Last Christmas ‘ By Rene Diedrich

A slumlord with escalating concerns about his standing in a corrupt community and his own fading powers celebrates his final Christmas with his wife and the 3 stooges he has working for him. The rundown rentals he owns all over town are a source of money and power which he secures by way of said stooges who don’t fix things or deal with property problems. They bully tenants and steal from the renters at their boss’s command. Like the policy he’s made for the rental units, the Slumlord’s holiday traditions are best described as deviant. This includes hard drinking, reckless drugging and playing board games with the slumlord and his wife These people are genreally despicable and deserve a scrooge type nightmare, but this isn’t how real life works. There is, if we’re honest, rarely anything that resembles justice or even balance in this world if ours. Dark comedy prevails as the over indulged stooges make a mess of the day and their boss discovers his antics have not ever been punished because his wife never resents his tremendous transgressions because her life is so much better than it would’ve been with her own father a former stooge himself. Unnerving and unpredictable, this Christmas story careens into stranger contexts as the aging couple encounter storms, familial compromises and awareness of feelings they’ve blurred and betrayed as they’ve become estranged from their own humanity. Its a perverse story that makes one question our misguided delusions about life as the pleasures of the damned lead to what may be redemption
Please note that it’s hard to name a genre for this entry and you may revise my choice if necessary.

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