Crouch, Blake - A Little Orange Book Of Obsessions

A “little book” containing two stories and one novella.
“Summer Frost” introduces Max, short for Maxine, fleeing after a grisly murder. Perhaps.
Max is a NPC, an abbreviated backstory in a video game.
Except Max has a glitch and behaves outside her programming.
“Well, now that’s interesting,” thinks Riley, one of the developers, who clearly has never watched films such as Colossus: The Forbin Project, Ex Machina, or more appropriately, 2013’s Her.
Seeing potential, and potential profits, developer and corporation allot Max more CPU, mountains of memory, and feed gigantic amounts of data.
While the pace hurtles, you do have an idea where it is heading.
The final tale, “Shining Rock,” is a memorable lament of loss, dread and stalking.
Roger and Sue, a long married couple, hike deep into the Smokey Mountains.
One evening, without even a rustle, the stranger arrives into their campsite.
He is friendly, jovial, but so too is grinning Mick Taylor, scourge of the Australian Outback.
Mr. Crouch here is masterful, constantly shifting tone and focus.
What follows is an infernal corkscrew, fiendishly manipulating reader assumptions and sympathies.