“The Big Reboot” by Michael Hughes Wesner / The Masters Review
Jenny hugs me tight enough to pop my new head clean off.
Across my screenwriting years, I was always in hot pursuit of the elusive, undeniably high concept script idea: something with an immediately intriguing premise that could be described in a sentence or two (aka the “elevator pitch”). It’s what every producer was chasing. And every producer was necessarily being chased by every screenwriter.
High concept is often derided as being cheap or easy, especially in the world of literature, where novel manuscripts evolve gradually, word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page, across years and years. Where great ideas are grown, not birthed.
Definitely ask a novelist about their latest work, but try not to do it on an elevator:
“Well, it’s a little hard to describe. It’s about a family, a dynasty really. It’s Shakespearean in that way. There’s the father, a grizzled, embattled, shell of a man—”
DING!
“Wait, come back! There’s more!”
“The Big Reboot” (5,100 words) by Michael Hughes Wesner in The Masters Review is unabashedly high concept, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. On top of that, Wesner takes an interesting approach to tone.
You don’t hear a lot about tone. The charms of tone often fall under “voice,” but there’s a distinction to be made. The first-person POV used in this story (from our main character, Ian) is way lighter than it might be considering the medical catastrophe the story is built around. But it seems to me that that lightness is driven by the tone Wesner chooses for the story overall. It’s stubbornly effervescent in the face of big, serious, life or death questions. Which is, I think, a great choice.
No spoilers to come, because the premise of the story is right there in the opening line:
“The first thing I see through this new head of mine is Jenny’s smiling face, red-nosed and tear-crusted, gazing down at me in the hospital bed.”
Ian, it turns out, has been decapitated in a horrific traffic accident, and he’s the recipient of a brand-new noggin (“a hunk of plastic, stuffed to bursting with computer guts. Dentures and doll hair and marbly fisheyes.”)
Wow, an immediately intriguing premise. And we’re only one floor up since the elevator doors closed :)
The light tone lets us glide over the surface of a complicated medical procedure that could take pages to capture completely. And by not fixating on a long-winded, uncanny valley-ish description of Ian’s new dome, Wesner makes space for the emotional and the philosophical. This is more than a neat trick, considering that’s the real weight behind “The Big Reboot.” More so because that weight is couched alongside dad jokes (his brother “hangs a banner that reads, It’s A Boy!, with the last word crossed out and replaced with: New Head!”) and the goofily gruesome (to his fascinated nephew: “Wanna feel my neck seam?”)
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In another telling, “The Big Reboot” would be dark and gothic, replete with long shadows, tortured thoughts, and Frankensteinian angst. While we do stroll along the outskirts of that neighborhood, we mainly get sunshine and even playfulness. There’s some snark, but more often we get heartfelt. A loving and patient wife (Jenny). A brother (Nate) who’s navigating a divorce. And, to my mind, the story’s beating heart: a twelve-year-old nephew (Nate Jr.) who is wrestling with the gnarly appearance of his own keppie and the “fields of acne that litter his cheeks.”
I’ve written in these appreciations before about character construction, and how each player in a story’s cast presents an opportunity to reflect the main character and their circumstances in a different light. And that’s done wonderfully here. Ian’s brother, the family’s socially lubricated son who is “confident in his appearance” is the perfect mirror image of pre-accident Ian, who was tortured enough with self-esteem issues to have considered suicide, it seems. And young Nate Jr. is the next generation of young Ian, and so an in-the-flesh opportunity to stop intergenerational trauma in its tracks.
Here’s another impressive story design choice: because Ian’s got a new head, his memory of his pre-accident life is spotty. So he’s learning about his old character along with us. When his wife fears that old Ian’s essence is still running his programming, she acts on that threat.
Which brings on the big reboot promised by the title: according to doctors, it offers the couple one last chance to “ease [Ian’s] negative feelings forever.”
An operating room switch is thrown, and we’re treated to some authorial pyrotechnics—a rambling run-on sentence in a stream-of-consciousness that’s knee-deep, sans punctuation. It takes us right into the heart of Ian’s self-worth and elegantly poses the question of whether or not he can let go of the legacy of his old, self-doubting self.
Can Ian, can any of us, shuck our essence? Decapitated or not?
The answer to that question seems to come during a church service the whole fanm damily takes in at the close. Sitting in a pew, Ian, Jenny, Nate and Nate Jr. hold hands, wrap arms around one another, pat knees, as close and supportive as close-and-supportive can be.
“By the grace of God,” the pastor (a collared stand-in for Wesner) says. “We live such varied lives.”
Amen to that.
The Masters Review offers a quality platform for emerging writers. They are an online and in-print publication celebrating new writers. They’re on the lookout for the best new talent with hopes of publishing stories from writers who will continue to produce great work. They offer critical essays, book reviews by debut authors, contest deadlines, submissions info, and interviews with established authors, all with the hopes of bridging the gap between new and established writers.
Their New Voices category is open year-round to any new or emerging author who has not published a novel-length work of fiction or narrative nonfiction with a major press. Authors with published short story collections are free to submit.
The Masters Review pays a flat rate of $100 for flash-length stories (1,000 words or fewer) and $200 for longer stories (up to 7,000 words).
Their sixth annual Novel Excerpt Contest , guest judged by Chinelo Okparanta (author of Under the Udala Tree, and the forthcoming This Impossible Life) is currently open for submissions and will close on November 8, 2026.
~*~
Michael Hughes Wesner is from Philadelphia, and his short fiction has been featured in The Good Life Review and The Bulb Region. “The Big Reboot” took third place in The Masters Review’s bi-annual Winter Short Story Awards. An alumnus of the Kenyon Review Fiction Workshop, Michael is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama and Fiction Editor of Black Warrior Review.
Many thanks to Michael Hughes Wesner and The Masters Review for the brand-new-head and shoulders above other short stories tale that is “The Big Reboot.”
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