horror

Though the study and practice of medicine has been around since the beginnings of human civilization, it is only within the past 150 years that the medical field has made its most groundbreaking and world-changing discoveries and advancements. We’ve learned what germs are, what they do, and how to destroy them; we’ve discovered DNA sequencing and the secrets of genetic coding; and we’ve advanced the act of surgery, once a desperate battlefield choice likely to kill the patient, to an outpatient procedure that people can volunteer for when they don’t like the shape of their noses.

Isolation and loneliness are often at the heart of any situation that instills irrational fear in humanity, and nothing is more isolated and lonely than the untamed American West. With hundreds of lawless miles in-between outposts of civilization, a single human being is at constant threat from rough terrain, weather, and both animal and human predators. When he finds himself dehydrated, starving, lost, or injured, he becomes imprisoned by that distance; it is claustrophobia in the world’s biggest locked room.

CW LaSart’s horror collection is very accurately named, Ad Nauseam, as it harbors thirteen tales of intensely stomach churning horror. LaSart is a pro at spinning a driving story with characters who often live on the fringe of society’s idea of convention and do not warrant much pity for their decisions in the direction of their lives. However unconventional LaSart’s characters may be, the terror that awaits them in her stories are nothing less than gut wrenching.

Left on the roadside by their wayward and absconding mother, Delphine Dodd realizes this time is not like the others. She and her little sister, Olive, have been discarded on the side of the road like trash, only to find themselves floating aimlessly into the care of their unfamiliar grandmother. Set in the early settlement years before the First World War, S.P Miskowski weaves Delphine’s vivid recollections of her adolescence into a haunting dreamscape.