Lira

Armanis Ar-feinial does a great job in creating a horror novella, it had me on the edge of my seat from the beginning and didn't let go till the end. The characters were what I was hoping for from the genre. I'm glad it worked well overall and was hooked from the author.

"She descended further into the dark, an unknown sludge caked her legs with each step. She moved forward, getting further and further away from her hovel. She heard a screech. Yes, yes. That’s it. A K’hara! A great beast flying in the air, and unlike traditional animals, they can see in the Abyss. They care not for the light. Another reason to flock to the light during such times, don’t you think? But it was too early, and she had traversed too far for that to be an option."

I had a hard time with this one. It’s very dark and grim. There are glimmers of kindness, but in a world so broken even kindness is tainted with the need to survive and the ever consuming hunger caused by mass starvation. The narrator is extremely belligerent to the reader who in turn is put in the place of a privileged but decidedly ignorant young royal who has no idea the suffering of the lower classes in his kingdom endure and finds the lurid tails of execution, starvation and cannibalism to be overwhelmingly nauseating. I myself did not require a bucket, but I can sympathize because the horror was rather unrelenting and there is no resolution to the story. Obviously that would be unrealistic to expect any sort of happy ending in such a violent, dark, unpleasant future, but still you might want to avoid this if you suffer from depression, it is extremely detailed and bleak.