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A review by screamdogreads
The Comfort Zone and Other Safe Spaces by Tom Over
4.0
"The object was similar to those they'd seen out in the corridors, only grotesquely magnified. And, while those miniature versions had contained their horrific secrets within, this one did not. Its surface was a solidified swamp of regurgitated material - ribs and fractured femurs jutting outwards like protective spines. Chunks of cartilage and gristle marbled its flanks, some with teeth and tufts of hair attached. "
Disclaimer: The author of this book offered me a free copy in exchange for an honest review. This has in no way affected my rating, and the below thoughts are mine alone.
The Comfort Zone and Other Safe Spaces is a horror story collection for a decaying nation and a rotting world. It's a suffocating, smothering, all-consuming thing with a ceaseless claustrophobia hanging to its every page. Collectively, these are some of the strangest, weirdest, most feral of stories the horror world has ever spat out at us. Ironically, each story produces such an intense feeling of discomfort that it becomes a fantastically unsafe collection - the kind to make you feel as if the horrors are creeping right into your house. It's actually kind of mind-boggling, the range of emotion such a collection can generate, everything from what the fuck, I was eating to oh my god, I hate being alive, please, douse me in gasoline.
It's all really rather bleak and grim, there's this heavy, overbearing, unbearable sadness that steamrolls every story. It's a euphorically nihilistic and perverse collection, and it's all so fucking exciting. Despairing and desperate, this is a vividly grotesque little collection, it's genuinely distressing to read these stories. Some of the tales here connect together, and some of them don't, most of them offer nothing in the way of closure or explanation which only seems to elevate the dread and suffering of the thing.
Disclaimer: The author of this book offered me a free copy in exchange for an honest review. This has in no way affected my rating, and the below thoughts are mine alone.
The Comfort Zone and Other Safe Spaces is a horror story collection for a decaying nation and a rotting world. It's a suffocating, smothering, all-consuming thing with a ceaseless claustrophobia hanging to its every page. Collectively, these are some of the strangest, weirdest, most feral of stories the horror world has ever spat out at us. Ironically, each story produces such an intense feeling of discomfort that it becomes a fantastically unsafe collection - the kind to make you feel as if the horrors are creeping right into your house. It's actually kind of mind-boggling, the range of emotion such a collection can generate, everything from what the fuck, I was eating to oh my god, I hate being alive, please, douse me in gasoline.
It's all really rather bleak and grim, there's this heavy, overbearing, unbearable sadness that steamrolls every story. It's a euphorically nihilistic and perverse collection, and it's all so fucking exciting. Despairing and desperate, this is a vividly grotesque little collection, it's genuinely distressing to read these stories. Some of the tales here connect together, and some of them don't, most of them offer nothing in the way of closure or explanation which only seems to elevate the dread and suffering of the thing.
"Drowsy from the morphine, they ate between smiles and small talk and wondered, as they often did, if it were possible that others might be out there doing the same. Despite the drugs, her arm felt sore, but it made her feel better when she would see him slip around his chair on the one remaining buttocks he had left. It brought a smile to their lipless faces whenever it happened."
While this may be Tom Over's first book, it certainly doesn't read that way, it reads as the work of a veteran in the horror sphere. Reading Over's work is a bizarre experience, for sure there's grosser, more disgusting texts out there but there's just... something in the way that he writes, something so foul, so deeply effecting, it makes you want to vomit. Inducing anxiety in his readers seems to be something Tom Over excels at, it's just all so horrible and beautiful and lovely and perfect. The Comfort Zone and Other Safe Spaces is a collection that's here to dismantle the modern hellscape of cookie cutter shit, the work of Tom Over is here to usher in a new kind of future for horror.
As with any collection, there will be stories that stand out above the rest. For me, The Vegetarians, A Murmur of Shadows and The Embarrassed Landscape were the best of the best. Millipede dreams deserves a shoutout too for making me want to skin myself alive.
"They lived in squalor and ruin, objects of her disdain, victims of her negligence. Her children eventually died one day, alone, while she wandered the streets, hunting for something to inject into her bloodstream, something as transient and tragic as their own fleeting little lives."