Early in Hang Wire, Adam Christopher’s new urban supernatural thriller, a San Francisco blogger named Ted is sitting in a Chinese restaurant with some of his friends and colleagues, enjoying a meal. They have gathered to celebrate Ted’s birthday and exchange pleasantries and bask in one another’s company. The friends go around the table and open their fortune cookies, one after another, and read them aloud, performing the dinner ritual. Finally they get to the birthday boy, Ted, and he picks up his fortune cookie and opens it and it literally explodes in his hands, like a crunchy hand grenade with enough force to knock Ted to the floor and overturn the dinner table.
Ted, eerily unharmed, finds himself flat on his back, not entirely sure what just happened to him. He is not especially disturbed by the event nor, importantly, does he seem to have enjoyed his cookie much. This is a fair approximation of the impact of Hang Wire itself.