By Mike Moyer
I can’t help but recommend this novella, Dark Fuse, with a word of caution: read it with caution when you’re in a good mood. During the reading, I went from wanting to fly kites and pick roses to wanting to leave footprints on the trigger of a shotgun.
OK, I’m exaggerating. perhaps Kurt Cobain will not Apartment 7, Greg F. Gifune’s disturbing meditation on loneliness and addiction.
Charlie and his wife are middle-aged yuppies who overcame their shared addictions in their youth and eventually settled into a childless, career-focused marriage, but everything falls apart when Charlie discovers his wife having phone sex/sexing in the middle of the night with another man.
Charlie went from being a successful accountant to an alcoholic living in a small hut in the slums of Boston. As if life wasn’t enough to torture Charlie, he discovered that his wife was having an affair with another man.
Charlie stumbles through a desolate, snowy, deserted city. Gibson’s version of Beantown is a hellish dreamscape, a universe unto itself, filled with shadows and loneliness.
As Charlie’s reality slowly crumbles away, he’s now desperate to confront his wife’s lover. He encounters a particularly terrifying nine-year-old whose head resembles a half-formed demon baby, a pair of disturbing ballerinas, and a dark lord who vaguely resembles Satan, who sits on a bloody throne made mostly of feces.
Even though loneliness is considered the scariest monster, let me just say, friends, if my wife left me, I’d be more worried about the demon fetus than returning to an empty apartment and a cookbook for dinner for one.
My only glaring complaint with the story is that Charlie isn’t exactly the most active protagonist. At times I felt like he was being dragged along, sometimes literally, by all the demon babies, horrible ballerinas, and creepy happy white trash cabbies.
However, these few flaws do not detract from the quality of this book. It is dark and confusing, full of fear. Apartment 7 It still lingered in my mind after I finished reading it.
Order yours here.
score: 3.5/5
