Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories

I'm a pretty avid horror reader but I didn't come into the genre easily. I spent most of my life being mesmerized by the mysteries and monsters but being so deeply afraid of being afraid that I couldn't bare to look past the cover of a horror book or watch more than few seconds of a spooky movie. The fear I felt of what "true" fear might feel like was so profound that I couldn't experience much of life at all. I couldn't stay the night at friends houses, go to museums, answer the phone, walk around a corner without anticipating the horror lurking just out of view. It would take some pretty intense antidepressants and a year of letting those marinate before I could dip a toe into the world of horror and when I finally did, nothing could capture the fear I felt for the unknown.

All this to say that this book and its weird little stories might be the closest anythings come to that feeling from when I was a kid. The stories aren't scary (to me), to be honest, the almost feel mundane but it's that mundanity that makes the approach of the unsettling so effective. These stories creep up slow on you and I love how it slightly gets more intense with each story till there's almost a release at the end. This selection of stories is it for me and I will be digging into whatever else Guadeloupe Nettle has in store!