“After Karl is forced to put down his beloved pet Brady, he unintentionally releases a beast from another dimenson. If he wants to save himself and those around him, he’ll have to figure out how to put the beast back and accept that none of us is ever really gone.”
Hey pals! This is a non-spoiler review so go forth merrily and verily.
BRADY is a novella by D. W. Hitz, and my first read by this author. It’s a quick, fast-paced story, full of action, gore, and horror. As the blurb states, our protagonist Karl accidentally unleashes a particularly nasty brand of chaos, and is plunged into a world of pain because of it.
There are many things I enjoyed in this novella, and some I have some criticisms of. I’m going to start with the latter, because this really is a very fun story and I’d like to spend the back half of this review enthusing about it.
Mostly what I found a bit jarring were the scenes involving the police, and more specifically, their procedures. When Bartram and Rucker were introduced, I found myself scratching my goaty beard, a bit perplexed by their behaviour and language. They seemed unprofessional and also very overreactive and fearful to me (considering that they’re cops, before anything nuts happens), and some of the dialogue felt off, for example: ‘Could be the killer.’ I thought they’d use terms like ‘perp’ or ‘suspect’ instead. However, I may well be wrong in my assumptions and talking out of my uppity fluffy rear. I’m but a humble goat and I’m in no way an authority on how cops talk to eachother or act when they’re on the job, especially American cops. I’ve only been to the U.S.A once and had no dealings with the police while I was there. They couldn’t catch me.
My only other real gripe is that the perspective of the story-teller changes a few times. Karl’s the protagonist, and then we switch to a couple of other characters now and then. I was on board with one of them, because this character’s perspective was essential for the story, but I felt strongly that Hitz should have limited this switching to just the two characters. It wasn’t necessary for our view to switch to anyone else really, and in a novella this size, I think this technique just detracted from Karl, and weakened the storytelling a little. This is a particular bug-bear of mine, and I’m sure it wouldn’t bother most people, but it’s just something I’m really picky about.
Lastly, there were a few times when I felt that the descriptions of certain things fell a little flat – and I hasten to add that this was only noticeable to me because for the most part, Hitz absolutely nails setting a scene or describing some horrible event. Sentences like ‘He screamed in ways he never knew he could,’ bugged me because I thought, ‘Come on, man! I KNOW you could think of an awesome way to describe a hideous scream!’ Honestly, the gore in this book is excellent, and during the horrific scenes, I was all in. Which leads me to the positives…
… THE GORE! THE GORE! There are several notes in my copy that just say ‘this is awesome’ with an arrow pointing to a paragraph that depicts immense carnage. Writing violence and gore is not my forte – I suck. I just can’t picture the mind-bending savagery well enough to horrify a reader with scenes like the one in this book. This is not a problem for Hitz! In fact, I’d say that writing the actual scenes of horror is his greatest strength. The guy knows how to paint an incredibly vivid and immersive picture. There were times that elements of the story felt reminiscent of The Mist, and also Venom (you’ll probably see what I mean when you read it). Such great genre tropes mashed together in a way that felt organic and atypical of what I’d normally expect.
It wasn’t just the way he described these scenes that impressed me either – but the scenes themselves were great. BRADY is quite a cinematic reading experience, the writing allows you to so easily envisage the details that it does play out in your mind like you’re watching a film.
The opening was good too – depressing, but good. Intriguing. I also thought the author was pretty good at feeding in character details that made you question things about them, and I very much enjoyed lines like this one:
‘The world they considered physical; it was no more than a container of filth,’
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It’s highly entertaining and fun to read with what appears to be a well-thought-out plot. What’s exciting to me about D. W. Hitz is that he’s a skilled storyteller, but it’s evident to me that he has enormous potential on top of the talent he already possesses. I’m already lining up my next read by this author and I can’t wait.
I’d recommend this to most horror fans, particularly fans of dark, supernatural tales, and splatterpunk readers.
If you’d like to get your own copy of BRADY, you can find it here:
If you’d like to find out more about D. W. Hitz and his work, you can find his website here:
Happy Goat Horror 
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