![]() ![]() This tale begins with a letter by a woman to her lover, starting with a graphic description of how their relationship began and following the narrative all the way up to a certain incident that came between the two. Moving a little (but not too much) closer to conventional horror territory we find “Sincerely, Charlotte” by Rayne Havok. He heads outside for his medication but the walk to his pharmacist simply opens the door to a whole world of cajoling objects – not to mention bystanders to get caught up in his violent compulsions. This story’s protagonist is a man who suffers from auditory hallucinations, hearing assorted inanimate objects (a stove, a knife, his notebook of dirty limericks) encouraging him to commit various acts of self-harm. Perhaps the strangest aspect is that there is an actual emotional arc running through the story, with the burnt-out protagonist receiving a new lease of life from his blobby friend.Īnother example of the bizarre being treated as mundane is “Perceptual Disturbances” by Simon McHardy. ![]() It just ate up some squirrels and a couple of raccoons. “You can see it too, Pat? I’ll be damned. “What the fuck is that thing, Gary?” Pat called to me from the fence line. This was, unfortunately, where the trip began to go very bad. I didn’t know it was the end of the world either, so as I watched raccoons and squirrels melt to nothing inside of an ever-expanding blob that was now nearly fifteen feet wide with wobbling balls of gelatin slowly oozing their way to join the main mass staring eyelessly at me, it was with a smile of eager anticipation. ![]() This excerpt is typical of the story’s tone: All of this is witnessed through the eyes of Gary, a man who is presently experiencing a bad trip, making the already weird situation all the more surreal – particularly when Gary adopts a large blob as a pet, calls it Blobert, and sics it after neighbours he dislikes. Ennenbach, depicting an apocalyptic event in which blobs of alien jelly rain down on earth, devouring any lifeforms that get too close. Things get weirder still with “Blobert” by M. ![]() Yet the story works thanks to a portrayal of the couple’s low-life existence that is as textured and as toe-curling as the growth on Crystal’s back. Not a large amount happens here – until the twist ending, the plot consists largely of the rash growing worse while the characters try without success to diagnose it. This time the protagonists are a meth-addled couple, Ron and Crystal, the latter of whom develops a strange rash after scraping her back on the wall of a public lavatory. Elizabeth Bedlam’s “Poached Eggs” is similar in that it likewise brings to life a rather thin narrative through well-drawn characters. The opening piece is “Carla’s Conundrum” by Aron Beauregard, about a woman who copes with personal loss by using a pair of puppets as alter egos the story becomes an oddball character study as we see her behaviour through the eyes of various different members of her social circle, before arriving in a visceral climax. While some of the anthologies on the Splatterpunk Awards ballot are bulked out with large numbers of stories, Between a Spider’s Eyes offers a selection of tales that are comparatively few in number (there being eight in all, hence the title) but quite substantial in length. ![]()
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