LL Press, $0.99
Horror, 2018

Liam Llewellyn’s The Painting could have been a charming little story about how a bitterly jealous artist, Milo Keller, resorts to dark arts to bolster his career over that of his rival Ian Marks. Alas, while his efforts lead to some success in his own career, Ian’s career seem to be bolstered to a far greater degree each time Milo sells a painting. Eventually, he begins using dark arts to sabotage Ian’s career instead.

Well, it could have been, that is. The problem here is that the author drops jargon and concepts related to… I don’t know, Satanism, Renaissance magic, or something to such a liberal degree, without any prior explanation, that I feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a university lecture without having attended any introductory courses. To put it bluntly, two-thirds of this story is gibberish to me, and frankly, this story isn’t special enough for me to want to voluntarily do my own research to understand the mumbo jumbo.

At any rate, this story is a pretty standard cautionary horror tale that I could have come across in any random horror anthology, not that this is necessarily a bad thing. The climactic scene here is pretty intense, suggesting that the author maybe does have a pretty good head when it comes to horror. That is, so long as he integrates concepts of the occult more seamlessly into his story without making me feel like I should have read a textbook beforehand.