Oikos accurately captures the woe of everyday life for a generation without a common gripe. Lamb should not be seen as one person but as a composite image of every man born between 1982 and 1989: mostly distant, lost, and wondering what our parents had that we do not. This novella could, through one darker prism, be seen as a letter in response to the American dream handed down to us by parents whose Great Cold War disallowed them the ability to think straight and so drove us willy-nilly into more than one real war. It could be seen as a laundry listing of emotions experienced by anyone trapped in a cooling romance. However it is seen, Oikos' craft garners a certain respect for accurate description, and that is enough reason to rank it among the better novellas of the new decade.
Oikos is an intimate but humorous exploration of existential anxiety.
In Oikos, Adam Moorad excels at two things in particular: characterization and conveying the minutiae of everyday life.
Unlike more typical iterations of the stream-of-consciousness approach, Oikos does not blink in the face of alternative reality: that the mind is a weapon capable of inflicting misery, but often incapable of annihilation.
