Welcome to Hell… Meet Johnny Fitzgerald, a lonely, divorced graphic illustrator with a major heroin habit. When Johnny accidentally gets trapped inside a deserted self-storage warehouse with his six-year-old son, he is forced to face demons both real and imagined. For the next 10 days, father and son fight for their lives. They battle thirst, hunger, and perhaps the worst human craving of them all — heroin withdrawal. But this is only the beginning of Johnny s painful education in de-tox. Because there is something dark and terrifying behind Johnny s dope-sick hallucinations … something touched off by the place itself. From the New York Times bestselling author of THE WALKING DEAD: INVASION comes a book that mixes the brutal surrealism of Chuck Palahniuk s FIGHT CLUB with the dark fantasy of Clive Barker. SELF STORAGE will keep you up at night long after you reach the brutal conclusion.
Dark bleatings, my curious tribe! I first became familiar with Jay Bonansinga when I found his co-written The Walking Dead novels (with Robert Kirkman). I was in quite the TWD phase at the time and discovering Jay was a much welcome addition to my obsession. This is the first completely independent story I’ve read by him and it is awesome.
Johnny picks up his 6 year old son for the Christmas holidays, they swing by his storage unit to pick something up, the door falls, and they are trapped. It’s the day before Christmas Eve, Johnny’s phone is dead, they have no food or water, and rescue in any sort of timely manner is unlikely. Plus, there’s the small issue of Johnny’s heroin addiction and the fact that within a matter of hours, his body is going to go into withdrawal.
This scenario is an absolute nightmare of epic proportions, and I felt stressed reading it (but in an entertained way!). Thanks to spending a couple of weeks on a morphine drip in hospital some years ago, I am unfortunately no stranger to opiate withdrawal, and this aspect of the story alone was enough to make my toes curl. I can’t imagine being trapped in the dark with no home comforts in that kind of physical and emotional state, not to mention the very real possibility of dehydrating to death AND having to watch helplessly as your kid suffers the same fate.
As if that isn’t bad enough, it seems that something else is happening. Something that shouldn’t be, something that is impossible, and yet….
Every aspect of this story invoked a different angle of horror. I think there was real genius in the fine details. One of my favourite types of horror film is the kind where you spend the runtime trying to figure out how you’d get out of the situation (The Platform, The Circle, Saw, Escape Room, etc.). I find it less ‘YAY’ and much more ‘Oh God…’ to read though, not least because I couldn’t come up with any way to get out of that effing storage unit. Not a thing. It’s anxiety inducing, I tell you!
Something else that I really enjoyed is that this story is packed with metaphor and layered meaning but it’s not pretentious. The reveal of what’s truly going on and why was also quite a surprise, because it wasn’t at all what I expected. Same sort of direction but totally different details than what I thought might come up, but well set up. I can’t give more detail without spoiling it but I will say that I found it very thought-provoking. The author could have gone in a more conventional direction in terms of the cause of all the issues, but he went a bit rogue and it worked.
I’d recommend this to horror fans, especially if you enjoy stories about people being trapped. It’s a really compelling read. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you. I’ve used the USA Amazon link for the book because though it IS available in the UK, the only version of the book I could find for sale here is super pricey!
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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