Wayward priest Cris Corelli rids himself of the sacred collar and leaves town, boarding the midnight train with no destination in mind. Satan is following him – lurking in the shadows. Corelli finds himself at an unassuming boarding house run by beautiful, yet tortured, Jules. She has her own secrets. They are the kind that echo in the mind, despite the screams that are meant to drown them. On Thanksgiving Day, 1985, Cris and Jules are bonded by a senseless act of violence that brings the small town to its knees. They indulge in drugs and alcohol to numb the pain, and together, they teeter on the edge of darkness. What they don’t yet know, is that Satan still lurks.
Dark bleatings, my sacrilegious tribe! I’m really happy to talk to you about this short novel today because it felt quite unique to me as I was reading it. I have to say, I’ve been really focusing on my review requests recently in a bid to get through them, and I have not been disappointed by the general quality.
Sacrilege, as you might infer from the title, has a religious aspect. This is something I find fascinating in real life, as an atheist with an interest in religion, and it’s something I start salivating over when it’s applied to horror fiction.
Cris Corelli rolls up late one night to a boarding house and pays upfront in cash for a couple of weeks. It’s established almost immediately that he’s an alcoholic struggling with sobriety, which does not make him a bad person. What made me wonder if he had done something bad was the fact that he turns up so late and pays in lovely, untraceable cash. We also learn early on that Cris used to be a priest, which opens up a world of wonder in terms of why he might be running. Men of the cloth are supposed to be morally sound authority figures, but in real life we know that unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
Our other main character, Jules, runs the boarding house, and has a somewhat abrasive personality. This made me wonder if she’s just kind of a bitch, or if she’s been conditioned to draw a hard line right off the bat with anyone she encounters because of past experience.
I was fascinated from the first chapter because there was immediate intrigue in what incites the story in Cris and Jules meeting, and the characters were already nuanced. What excites me the most about any given story isn’t always the story itself, but rather how the story is told, and the pinnacle of story telling for me is when the story is revealed through subtleties in the characters. Impressions, implications, and seemingly insignificant details, or even misleading details – these are the staples wielded by authors with an eye for which building blocks are the most interesting, and I found it in spades here.
So what is the story, you might be asking? Quite simply, we have two troubled characters, each with their own trauma, fighting their inner demons together. About two thirds of the way in, I’ll admit that though I found this an excellent tale of two people in the throes of their specific troubles, I was wondering how on Earth it could be considered horror. Well…I found it. There’s a revelation in the third act that threw everything I thought I knew into the wind, and all of a sudden, rather then being hooked by how these people might overcome their vices, I was hooked by whether or not everyone was even coming out alive.
If you’re looking for horror in the traditional sense – supernatural occurrences, maybe blood and guts, anything loud, really – this won’t be an ideal match. However, if you’re looking for a character driven trauma tale with unexpected turns, heartbreak, danger, and a slow unravelling sense of anxiety, this might be right up your street.
Overall, I loved this story and found it a mesmerising exploration of two people who might or might not be worthy of your empathy. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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