Amy Parker, $0.99, ISBN 978-1301299256
Horror, 2013
One thing I always find odd about horror fiction is that there are many different flavors of horror, and yet, the stories I come across tend to revolve around the same handful of tropes and premises. I suppose someone new to or unfamiliar with these stories may find them scary, but as someone that has taken way too many times a ride of the scary train to spook town, it’s hard for me to muster much enthusiasm for another story that has a very familiar premise. This is basically my problem with the otherwise well written Bug House.
Basically, we have a woman awakening in a hospital, with no recollection of her past or the events that led her to end up in this place. In the meantime, she meets the only person that is nice to her, a janitor. Since this story has a big bug on the cover, naturally that thing has to show up some time for the scares.
That’s basically the story. This is a pretty short story, and I sort of guessed the twist between her and the janitor pretty early on, because Amy Parker isn’t exactly subtle with the way she is handling things in this story. Still, the story leaves open a few possibilities as to what is really happening in this story, but as I’ve said, I’ve read and watched something like this tad too many times already. I’m not exactly bowled over by this story.
Still, I have to hand it to the author: I feel this haunting sense of sadness for the lead character by the time I finish this thing. I use the word “haunting” because, even now, when some time has passed since I last read it, I still feel this biting sense of loss experienced by the main character as I recall the last paragraph of the story. I can empathize with her loneliness, as well as her sense of alienation and isolation from her surrounding and circumstance, and I want her to get better, I really do.
Hence, Bug House may be an average horror story, but if I looked at it instead as a story of loss, confusion, madness… well, it works pretty well and hits the feels hard.
I suppose how one reacts to this one depends on their expectations—just don’t let the cover give this impression that this is a creepy-crawly terror tale, because it really isn’t.
