Publisher's Weekly
Being paranoid provides no reason to doubt that They are out to get you, as Lain's ambitious postmodern story collection proves. In homage to past warriors against totalitarianism, contemporary Winston Smiths battle the trap of capitalism's ever-receding promise of a meaningful life via meaningless work ("Instant Labor"). Picking among the castoffs of baby boomer consumerism, Lain's Gen-X protagonists desperately try to construct an identity in a culture where novelty undermines authenticity. The simplicity of sea monkeys ("The Sea Monkey Conspiracy") and the rigidity of the Cold War ("I Read the News Today") are the closest to fixed values that can be found, and even they are uncertain at best. Characters learn, via a malfunctioning holographic Jesus ("How to Stop Selling Jesus"), that salvation is not granted but attained. Lain intrudes in his narratives, exploiting metafictive devices like direct address and references to other stories, tying a character's quest for identity to his own quest to unravel the stifling logic of America's malled-in society. Distracting typographic tricks contribute to the atmosphere of uncertainty.
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Booklist
Lain takes full advantage of sf's surrealist possibilities, with results that one sometimes wishes were funny rather than disturbing and provocative. In one story, a man dismissed from the navy as crazy tries to reconnect with reality by labeling things; for instance, he writes "swimming pool" on a card he tosses in the water before he can dive in. In another, after a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India triggers a globe-circling current of lethal radiation, the narrator eventually splits in two, reflecting perhaps his determination to continue with wife and lover as before; they'll all die soon, anyway. In one of the best, a salesman of interactive Bibles learns "How to Stop Selling Jesus" when a holographic Christ insists he take his place on the cross. The forms of some stories are as outre as their developments; they're set in whole or in part as Q-and-A interviews or as a numbered list of propositions or one--sentence precis of famous books. Sf comes no stranger, nor for some, surely, more gratifying, than this.Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The Oregonian
Portland writer Douglas Lain's debut, [sits] in a sci-fi genre space somewhere after the early psychodramas of J.G. Ballard but before the advent of cyberpunk, Lain's stories are unconcerned with the cheesy set-dressings of the form. Who needs outer space when the confines of inner space (mental illness, brainwashing, enforced drug therapy) offer so many richly claustrophobic avenues? Curt Schultz

Fantasy Magazine
Douglas Lain is one of the most interesting new writers to bubble up out of the world of small press SF publishing these past few years, with original, moving, intelligent stories appearing mostly in small press zines and ezines. [...] Lain's stories are often funny, but darkly so.[...] Favorites include "The Headline Trick", built around a plain goofy money-making idea but gaining its emotional kick from the intersection of the protagonist's personal life and contemporary events (revolving around the war in Iraq) as reflected in headlines [...] Lain is certainly among those newer writers whose work sometimes gets labeled "slipstream" - for the lesser of such writers one sometimes feels "slipstream" is an excuse for lack of rigor: for Lain, it is simply the right artistic choice to communicate his themes, which are very much in the spirit of Sterling's original definition of the term: "a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel."

Craig's Book Club
If there is a "Douglas Lain" type of story, it probably involves the protagonist's descent into madness in some form. But just as often it's the world that's gone mad -- merely causing Our Hero to think he is the only one. [...] I unabashedly admire his skill at what he does, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. These are stories I'm going to want to revisit again and again. Craig Clarke

Strange Horizons
Douglas Lain's work brings writerly obsession to a new level‹most writers (and perhaps all great writers) have a limited range of subject matter and styles, a certain tendency to revisit favorite themes and motifs, but we'd have to invoke the ghost of Samuel Beckett to find another writer of such single-mindedness, of such habitual reiteration. [...] The effect is paradoxical: each story separately is at the very least skillful, and quite a few seem to me to be minor masterpieces, yet they become numbing when read one after another, leaving us with a book that is better read in small doses than devoured complete.Matthew Cheney