This Darkness Mine
by G.
R. Yeates
Description
The City is a house
of flies, slowly rotting away. Soho Ghetto is a place of riots, sex, abuse and
disease but it is no worse than the corporate meat-markets that staff their
offices with the corpses of recently-deceased employees. Have you ever been to
The Shop? Would you know a Bottom-Feeder if you saw one? Do you know what it
feels like to be eaten alive by a Redundancy Package? Would you like to meet a
Fallen Angel? All of these things and more are here. This is the bestiary of
the 21st Century. This darkness mine.
Excerpt
There’s a place
called The Shop and you can get everything there. Good price. Low price. Cut
price. That is, everything you don’t want. Why would you want something you don’t want? That’s
what you’re thinking but is that not what we want all our lives long? Things to
fall over at home, ever-increasing hoards of rubbish, snapping, splintering,
breaking-down clinkered heaps of microchip, beads, plastic, perished rubber and
wood.
So in we go, into
The Shop.
Marching in, we tick
the box on the disposable card-strip and stand patiently in line. Our faces
serene, unlined and our guts gurgle, our throats are in turmoil, so eager,
expectant. We know what’s coming, what the assistants will bring to us, place
in our hands, hurriedly. Look at us askance, plead with their eyes for us to
take it away. They wipe their hands on their tunics to erase the wet electric
sensation of having touched our purchase.
They try to look
away but are drawn back to stare at it. The softly shifting dimensions of it,
the out-of-focus outlines, patches of damp. Then, there is the way the
vestigial limbs twitch and grow, fingers and toes recede and deform, according
to the mood of the purchase. Stinking geriatric fuck-holes open and beg,
embarrassingly, in public, to be fingered as we pass by. A slit opens, forming
a lizardly eye from yellow putrescent jelly. The eye is soon overcome though,
strangled to death by the bloodshot web of its capillaries. It makes such a
mess when it pops like an old egg, the dripping remains of it giving birth to a
rustling brood of white-haired whining spiders, which scatter to every dark
corner.
Some of the
purchases are swathed in used hospital linen whilst others are stuffed into
stapled-shut supermarket boxes, bandaged with reams of brown packing tape to
keep the amniotic fluids in, as much as is possible. We hurry out. We are
ashamed.
The Shop is an odd
place.
Every city has one.
Review
By
AnnBoozeandBooksBlogspot
This is the latest
horror book from a favorite of mine, G.R. Yeates. Those familiar with his
Vetala cycle books will note this one is quite different; in fact, it is
different from most fiction. It is written in the style of William S.
Burroughs' Naked Lunch, although I
think Yeates takes things one step further with This Darkness Mine.
Yeates uses a lot of
very violent and sexual imagery to illustrate just how soul sucking modern
life, and the corporations who run it, can be. In the first half of this novel
the reader is brought through a typical day in an office, one where every
unique thing about an individual is taken from them and the brain dead are
prized. I think this is something anyone who has worked somewhere they haven't
liked can understand all too well. The second half of the book follows the
worker as he is laid off from his job and thrust out into the streets. Here we
see how consumerism has taken over everything to the point that it has become
its own entity; it feeds on our humanity until there is nothing left that is
recognizable.
Using short, harsh descriptive sentences, Yeates is able to drive home his points about modern culture and its problems in a very thoughtful and provocative way. This unique read is highly recommended.
Using short, harsh descriptive sentences, Yeates is able to drive home his points about modern culture and its problems in a very thoughtful and provocative way. This unique read is highly recommended.
About the Author
Greg James, better known at the author G.R. Yeates, was born in Rochford,
Essex and studied Literature & Media at the Colchester Insitute. He has
lived in China where he taught English as a foreign language.
A life-long interest in the First World War and world mythology inspired the
critically-acclaimed The Vetala Cycle, a trilogy of vampiric horror novels set in World War I. He has been
published in the Dark Continents anthology, Phobophobia, and the Horror for Good anthology from Cutting Block Press. This
Darkness Mine is Greg's latest novella. He is currently working on another
novella, The Thing Behind the Door,
to be released December 2012. Greg is also working on his first fantasy series,
The Age of the Flame. The first book,
When Darkness Dawns will be released
early 2013, to be followed by The Sword
of Sighs and Shadowhorn later in
the year.
Links
