CS Caspar, $0.99, ISBN 978-1310667787
Horror, 2015
CS Caspar’s Don’t Let Him In is a short and simple tale of the protagonist being tormented by a fiend that threatens to kill them and all their loved ones. I won’t say that this is something that I have never read before, but with the right execution, this one could have been a little chiller of a read.
Unfortunately, the execution is off on a rocky start, because the author is way too fond of using purple phrases that convey little to me, the reader.
I let him into my house although I never should have. He was evil or rather in the presence of evil. Nevertheless, I let him in, because after all, he was a blood relative
While we sit around the dining table, casual conversation passes through the room like an icy southern wind. Conjured ideas find us suspended in an unmeasured exchange where the words spoken are like a sacrifice of troubles yet to surface and so they perish for want of air. Like the legacy of an untraveled road his words are raw-boned and wicked. And like the itinerant throng of endless darkness, they come from the lips of a perished stranger. A man who no longer belongs in this world and hearing his voice is like taking an evil journey, divided by the passenger vision of lonely dreams. Unimaginable dreams, that fill a preordained legacy and heavy with dread. His voice is the one that offers a voyage where only the insane and bizarre people have the right to travel. What comes from his mouth is like a parody of ungrounded gibbering, forced out by an inbuilt intuition and yet I refuse to acknowledge his torment, but hover in hope, while watching his poignant expressions.
This man I see that sits across the table is like a lonely bewildered stranger; an emissary of darkness, who has been thrust carelessly into reality. His face is but a mirror, unsupported by reflection and his voice sounds like the final struggle against insanity. But my interpretation is, in effect—only a memory of his past misery and grief. Emotions which haunt and pilot every human action, and is fundamentally the expression born of past experience. However, I also know that tragedy is a hungry opportunist asserting its own power.
The above are the first three paragraphs of this story, and it never gets better; things never become any clearer as the author just keeps using all these long, running sentences to actually say very little. From the three paragraphs alone, I don’t visualize anything other than the author constantly pausing in the midst of writing to go, “A-ha! I sound so very smart, don’t I?”
Things become a little more coherent once I approach closer to the end of the story, but even then, the whole thing feels off. The narrative from a protagonist with tormented mind should be more fractured, right? Sentences should be more disjointed, fragmented, perhaps panicked and crazed in places. What I get here instead are reams and reams of words, balled up and knotted in unnecessarily showy and melodramatic long sentences more suitable for a pompous theater kid’s monologue on stage.
That’s what Don’t Let Him In feels like, though: a long, meandering monologue of someone on stage that is more intent on showing off than embodying the spirit of the play. It’s way more pretentious than it has any right to be, and far less effective as a horror story as a result. Yes, this one can stay outside.
