This story is a joyful and grisly homage to The Murders in the Rue Morgue (the story, not the ‘Maiden song), carrying the same strangely creepy, and thrilling vibe throughout, but without a detective in sight.
The pacing is bang! bang! bang! (or possibly Short Sharp Shock!) and to begin with I wasn’t sure what in the hell was going on. But, of course, everything made sense in the end.
Maxime and Lea awake in a hotel room after an argument the evening before. Following said argument, both had left the hotel to partake in practices that were not exactly expected (by me anyway) from a seemingly in-love couple in Paris.
But it’s cool, they’ve argued before and made up before. So what’s to worry about? Well there is just one thing. The couple are in Paris on business; criminal business. They want something very valuable from a dude in this city of love. They torture him, a little more fatally than they originally intended to, before obtaining a key they don’t know what to do with at first.
The couple argue some more. Suddenly they’re murderers and they convince themselves they will be caught soon enough. They inadvertently enlist the help of a waitress who tells them what this mysterious key is for. When they find the place, well I’m not going to say. This story is pretty short so giving too many details away will spoil it.
Needless to say, things don’t turn out too great for any of them.
There’s a monster after them. Is it actually a monster, though? It certainly isn’t human. If you’ve read or are familiar with the Poe story you can probably work out what it is.
This story didn’t exactly re-invent the wheel on a piece of torture equipment in the horror genre, but it was certainly a fun blast to read.
There were some nice splashes of gore and the monster was unnervingly vivid in its descriptions. This one is certainly worth checking out.
Categories: book review
MORGAN K TANNER, Writer of Horror 
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