Gary Kuyper, $0.99, ISBN 978-0463216248
Horror, 2019

Gary Kuyper’s Grandma’s Breath is not about monsters, ghosts, zombies, or anything so obvious. No, it’s more about how someone’s fear and revulsion of a certain something, that would seem irrational to most people, can drive that person into horrifying extremes.

In this case, Alice is triggered to extremes by anything that reminds her of her late grandmother—a mean, disgusting, smelly person whose final moments and rigor mortis left an indelible kind of phobia, PTSD, maybe both, that is triggered one day when she buys a lovely urn at a neighbor’s house-clearance sale and discovers that the content of the urn is the ashes of the neighbor’s late father.

That’s basically the summary of this short story; for me to tell more would be to spoil the story, and then the author and certain people reading this will want to kill me.

I’ll say this, though: I can see the macabre, gruesome ending coming from a mile away, which is the biggest setback when it comes to me wanting to lavish this one with more accolade.

However, I still have fun reading this one, mostly because of how normal and relatable the protagonist’s feelings about her grandmother can be—let’s face it, to some kids, old people are genuinely terrifying—and it’s hilarious and cringe-inducing how quickly things escalate from zany to oh my god.

This is like the good episode of Creepshow that never happened, and I like it. Maybe if I hadn’t read or watched too many scary stuff and have become familiar with many of the tropes, I’d love it more. Still, that’s more on me than the author.