Dark Duets 1:
SUGAR AND SPICE BY PENNY JONES
Once upon a time there were two sisters, but their life was anything but a fairytale.
THE UNSILENCING BY TEIKA MARIJA SMITS
A mysterious ailment strikes a schoolful of children, rendering them mute and motionless. One mother takes it into her own hands to find the evil truth behind it all.
Dark bleatings, my lovely tribe. I’m late getting this review out (apologies to the authors for that, I intended to rave about this prior to release), but oooh boy do we have some things to talk about. This slight but beastly book contains a story from each author, and they share the theme of children.
SUGAR AND SPICE by Penny Jones
The lovely Penny Jones is also known to me as Penny “Straight Up Savage” Jones because her fiction is…well…absolutely brutal. It’s honestly hilarious how savage her stories can be because she is such a wonderful, bubbly, nice person and I can’t believe her mind conjures the things she writes. I once had this idea that Penny’s mind was full of puppies and candy floss and gentle, soothing music. And then I read some of her stories and was entertained and horrified in equal measure.
Anyway, despite this story being light on physical horror elements (by that I mean blood, violence, gore, creatures, etc.), it left me in a state of despair. This is emotionally devastating. Two young girls live with their dysfunctional father who fell apart when their mother died, and the stepmother from Hell. Disney villains have nothing on this bitch. They’re neglected, hungry, and resorting to desperate measures just to eat, and that is only the start of their troubles.
The direction this went in and the note it ended on literally made me cry. So all around, excellent writing and story telling. I don’t know if “enjoy” is the right word for my experience of this because it was so dark, but I was utterly hooked. It was so compelling, harrowing, and I was extremely invested.
Penny, how could you?!
THE UNSILENCING by Teika Marija Smits
Teika is also a beautiful person that I’m delighted to know and it’s not the savagery of the detailing that surprises me about her writing, but the extremely creepy supernatural elements she weaves into a lot of her fiction. Honestly, some of what she comes up with is demented, which is meant as a compliment, of course. I don’t know Teika as well as I’d like to but my impression from my interactions with her is that she’s a sweet and wholesome person so some of the stuff that slithers forth from her imagination takes me off guard.
This is the story of a mother who, likes many other parents in her local area, are devastated by a sudden phenomenon. One day in school, all the kids just stopped. Stopped talking, communicating, stopped being. They’re all still alive but no one even knows if they’re aware of what’s happening around them. They seem conscious, but there’s no way to know. Good lord, I can’t even imagine what this would be like.
This story really gets to the heart of this mother’s determination not to give up, to persevere, and to do right by her kid at all costs. It really highlights the often overlooked and thankless task of being a parent, especially a mother, and also for those who work in care. I thought it was a really sensitive look at a really horrid scenario. Additionally, Teika works in some of that jarring supernatural weirdness that I love her writing for.
I think the order of the stories is perfect because Teika’s doesn’t end on quite the same harrowing note as Penny’s, but I think I liked both stories equally for completely different reasons. One thing I would say of both is that neither author was afraid to go to dark places to tell these stories, which I think is probably quite hard to balance in horror that involves kids. I personally don’t even go there when I’m writing because I know I’ll mess it up.
Overall, I wholeheartedly recommend this (though obviously if you’re sensitive about bad things happening to kids, bear that in mind). I think Penny and Teika brought their A-games. If you’d like to check out the book or the authors, I’ve popped some links below for you:
PENNY STRAIGHT UP SAVAGE JONES
Bleeeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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