Last week, I was under bed rest due to a fever. Boredom led me to search for a book to read. As usual, a search for the horror genre led me to select this set of short stories.
A journalist experiences strange visions at a stipulated time daily, and it starts getting worse day by day. These visions of supposedly real people are affecting him mentally. He writes down those visions to avoid going crazy. This book chronicles those visions - a couple living in an apartment building where neighbours are performing an exorcism, a box where a woman starts putting all the bad things around her, a boy kills a butterfly only to encounter something bad, etc.
The first thing that attracts us to the book is the abruptness of the stories. They start and end ambiguously. I would say that it becomes the boon and bane of the book. The ambiguity sparks an interest in you initially. The subtle undercurrent of dark humour will also keep you invested. But as we read on, the ambiguity takes the steam off a few of the stories. The author has tried many tropes (vampires, cults, urban legends, ghosts, haunted houses, etc), most of which have worked out really well. But in some of them, I feel it is a miss. Another drawback was the pacing. Some stories did not connect with me, and those stories slowed down my pace. The author had done a good job of making us uncomfortable in some of the stories. I wished that some of the stories could have had a better closure.
In brief, this book could have been a better one if there were a tad less ambiguity. Nevertheless, this is a good collection of stories with an interesting premise that can make you feel uncomfortable at times. A decent one-time read.
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