The only “awful possibility” is that you pick this book up and read it. Ok, now that’s out of the way, on to what I really think about this collection of short fiction.
It’s entirely unremarkable. It reads a lot like the work of Chuck Palahniuk only where Palahniuk uses short, choppy sentence structure TeBordo uses long, rambling sentence structure. TeBordo’s yawn-worthy horror stories implement mediocre plot twists for cheap shock value. For instance, a rather egotistical man goes to an old friend’s house to demand he make a new wallet for him (with matching handbag for his wife) and by the end he’s snipping the skin off his good old friend’s back to make such items. In another story, a man smokes some cigarettes in his apartment building’s stairwell while he has his wife tied up in his apartment. In yet another, a little kid is taught how to “steal” people’s kidneys. Perhaps I have read too many horror stories, seen too many scary movies, or am simply a bit dark myself but these stories just didn’t do it for me. Anyone can write something grotesque in order to elicit a response. For example: the little girl walked down the street, her backpack bouncing against her body and she skipped over cracks. The extra bounce in her step was due to two things: the A she got on her essay about Abraham Lincoln, and the fact that she had her stepfather’s head in the pack slung over both small shoulders.
Ooooooh creepy, right? No. Simply writing “and then this gross thing happened” doesn’t make you a good horror writer. Another problem was that the voice of each male character was extremely similar, detached and very focused on the thing at hand. This made each character seem like carbon copies of each other.
In between the stories are pages that look like postcards, one side an image (all with an unexplained black goo dripping over them) on the other side some writing. The postcards are connected while the stories aren’t, though the postcards don’t really make much sense, either. They are supposed to be from someone writing to his (or her?) spouse while they are on vacation together detailing what happened that day or a bit of conversation they had. It’s an interesting idea, but isn’t executed very well. They don’t tell a complete story, so they seem to act as just a fun diversion from the typical short fiction format.
I will say that Featherproof Books did a wonderful job putting the book together. It’s small, compact size is handy for slipping into purses or even a large back pocket, and I do like the thing with the postcards. It’s just too bad the content wasn’t as strong as the design of the book.
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