POLYBIUS: A Horror Play

Easy one sitting read. Would love to see a stage production of it.

Genuinely creepy at times. The ebb and flow of the tension is perfect. Things escalate, almost coming to a head, before someone diffuses it with a fun/strange/light-hearted/tangential observation/joke/non-sequitur and things circle around before personalities clash again. We circle this drain from all these different directions, watching the id of this cast of multi-dimensional characters boil over until everything implodes. It's great.

Dialogue is what Max does best and he straight up murders it here. Believable, witty, punchy dialogue is the core of everything he does, and really what elevates him as a writer.

It does feel a bit thin though. Like this should be the middle third of a bigger piece of work. Or the title piece in a collection of stories that all examine this techno-horror character-study theme from different angles.

Either way. Super worth the read. Wish he'd learn to write prose (or team up with someone skilled at it (S. Craig Zahler and Landis would be my fucking dream collab)) and write a novel already.