Review of Nathan Robinson’s “Ketchup on Everything”

Ketchup on Everything is a bit of a surprise of a novella.  I went into it not knowing anything about the story except for the brief blurb of a description, and came out of it with some mixed emotions.  It begins innocently enough, with a man traveling the countryside in his RV stopping at a roadside diner to grab a cup of coffee.  He seems to be talking to his wife in the vehicle before he steps inside, but it is a one-sided conversation that leaves the reader puzzled as to whether she is there or not.  Elliott seems like an affable, pleasant man, though there is a sadness about him that is only hinted at during the introduction to this tale.

Through flashback, we discover that Elliott’s young son disappeared years before.  He was playing in the family’s garden and all the sudden was gone.  The author makes the process of facing first the horror and dread of this experience quite vivid and real-especially for someone who has children and cannot escape the fear that your child could go missing.  From there it becomes a helpless, mind-numbing agony of frustration the more time passes without knowing what has happened.   The idea of an innocent child that you love more than life itself vanishing without a trace is something hard, if not impossible, for most of us to fathom.  Nathan Robinson allows the reader to ride along with both Elliott and his wife, who take too different roads in coping with the loss of their son, for the years of torture they suffer through.

By the time we return to the present, past the flashbacks, the sense of having lived in Elliott’s shoes makes what happens next all the more intriguing, though perhaps not as intense as the first part of the story where there is both pain and an undeniable hope that somehow, their lost boy will be found.  This is not a criticism of how the story comes to completion, just a tribute to the writing that leads up to that part of the story, which adds an interesting twist on Elliott’s sad and tragic tale.

Ketchup on Everything can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Ketchup-Everything-Nathan-Robinson-ebook/dp/B00JANUJXQ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1403144275