Rowan Byrne hasn’t stolen anything for ages—not since she started to straighten her life out after a personal tragedy. But the volume she’s just picked up in the new bookshop in town seems to want her to steal it. The text is very persuasive. There’s a book for everyone in Legends—a book that will encourage their worst impulses. Steal. Fear. Burn. Kill. It’s not long before Rowan’s small town, isolated from the outside world, is descending into mayhem. Assailed by her own demons, Rowan could try to cut and run. Or she could make a stand, and try to save the community she loves . . .
Dark bleatings, my lovelies! A book with a premise that will probably appeal to all of us today – Steal Me. The first thing I have to say is that every single time I pick up a novella for PS Publishing, I marvel at how beautifully presented they always are. There really is no other press that I know of that consistently makes so much effort with novella length work.
On to the book review proper. This story revolves around a new book shop. Where did it come from, and when exactly, are questions that arise as the weirdness of the place becomes apparent to our characters. This is no ordinary shop you see, for its books seems to appeal to and compel the worst traits of the people who enter it, however well-meaning they are. That’s not to say that the people who wander in are inherently bad – not at all – just that they are drawn to books that seem to know them, or know how to manipulate them.
Our main character, Rowan, is a reformed kleptomaniac, worthy of leading Home Alone 2’s Sticky Bandits. This isn’t behaviour she’s ever been proud of and she’s managed to resist the call of the five-finger discount for a while. That is until she goes into this new book shop and is drawn to a book that not only seems to speak directly to her, but is adament that she just take it. Before she knows what’s she’s doing, she’s swiped the thing. And she’s not the only person affected.
With a friend, Rowan embarks and discovering the dark underbelly of the shop in order to end its reign of intensifying carnage. It reminded me ever so slightly of Stephen King’s Needful Things.
One thing that didn’t work for me personally about this story was that I felt it didn’t quite live up to the potential of its premise – but bear in mind that I mean what I personally wanted to see from the premise and not necessarily what the author intended. It’s such an interesting concept and I thought the author could have gone crazy with the carnage that could have ensued. That’s not to say that there isn’t any carnage, but in a story like this, I always hope for a faster and more brutal escalation. Because of this, I found the pacing slowed a bit in the middle.
However, this is not a long book, around 100 pages or so, so it didn’t take long for things to kick back in for me. Where the story goes, the reason (and things!) behind the power of this book shop – now that was a lot of fun. I was transported to my beloved memories of shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark, where the premise always took us to a spirited teenager discovering something absolutely batshit insane that was driving the plot. Of course, in this story, the spirited teenager is actually an adult and the premise contained scenes of much more adult horror, but I got the wave of nostalgia and the same feeling of horror being fun out of this story.
If you like novellas and are looking for something extra weird in your horror, this will probably be for you. PS Publishing tend to do limited runs of their novellas and I checked and there are limited copies of this one, so if you’re interested in grabbing a copy or checking out the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
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