Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.
Determined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.
The more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.
A terrifying psychological nightmare from a powerful new voice in horror.
Dark bleatings, my lovely tribe. I’m here to talk about a novella that deals with some very heavy mental health themes today and I have to tell you that it is bleeeeeak. BLEAK. It’s really well written with masterful use of metaphor but it’s relentlessly dark and full of despair, so be warned if you pick this up that you are not in for a cosy time. At all.
Trigger warnings for really severe mental illness.
Our protagonist is suicidal. Not ‘depressed and it’s crossed his mind once or twice’ but very much at the end of his tolerance for life, and wanting out. He goes into an underground train station and there he finds himself trapped, unable to get back to the surface. This is a fairly obvious metaphor, but it’s just the start of the psychological rabbit hole. The situation and the imagery, and what the imagery signified, took me to dark places, I have to be honest. I am generally *fine* but I would proceed with caution with this book if you’ve suffered any of this type of ideation.
Things I thought were great: the raw empathetic honesty in how this character was written and how his thoughts and experiences are translated to us. The setting, which gets creepier, more confusing, and darker as you go on. The author’s ability to build a narrative like this without it coming off as pretentious. I’ve read a lot of books that are trying to do something deep that don’t quite land – they read as pompous shock value a lot of the time. This one feels like sincere psychological torture.
And, the final section of the book, which uses a ‘choose your own adventure’ mechanic. That’s normally a fun element (which I’ve never seen, actually, outside of the ‘choose your own adventure’ subgenre). Here, it works to severely heighten the horror because up until now, we’ve been a passive observer. All of a sudden, we’re responsible and knowing how much this person is already suffering, that was extremely daunting for me. In the real world, I know how it feels to think that my actions are solely responsible for someone else’s emotional wellbeing, and it can be traumatic. This was an angle of the story that I didn’t expect to see, and in terms of narrative technique, I thought it was a brilliant move, even if it did fill me with so much anxiety that I couldn’t turn the page for quite some time.
Things I didn’t love: it’s relentlessly depressing. Now, this is entirely personal preference in how I want to feel when I’m reading. I enjoy well written bleakness but struggle if there’s no let up, no glimmer of hope. However, because of the type of story this is, it HAD to be this way. To have sprinkled in lightness throughout would have been a disservice to the character and the point of the book. I might have struggled with feeling so miserable for this person but I sincerely admire the sturdy spine of the author for doing something so risky and truthful. If they’d gone a little more commercial, it wouldn’t be the art that it really is.
I can’t recommend this book to everyone because it absolutely is not for everyone. However, for those it IS for – maybe people in need of some understanding themselves, those who want to walk through their bleak horror with their empathy fully engaged – it’s excellent.
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeeeak
Happy Goat Horror 
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