"The Essences" by Davin Ireland (BADASS HORROR)

This Story would Make a Great Novel

BADASS HORROR is a Dybbuk Press book, available at Barnes & Noble

Bad endings can ruin great stories. Note Stephen King's “Big Explosion Everyone Dies” ending. It worked in The Stand, but he keeps doing it. How I Meet Your Mother and The Umbrella Academy killed all goodwill with their horseshit endings. Almost sad to think that the HIMYM writers really thought anyone wanted to see Robin and Ted end up together.

“The Essences” has a rushed ending, not nearly as bad as The Umbrella Academy or HIMYM, but definitely disappointing. For 18 pages, Ireland writes a creepy mystery full of solid prose and a compelling narrator. Gem, insurance inspector, is more than the cynical curmudgeon that often inhabits these tales. He's curious and inventive. The story hinges on his impulsive nature, but Ireland writes him with enough honesty that his actions are plausible.

The story has a great beginning. Gem is hiding in an alleyway, investigating fraud, when a sickly man walks in. I love this passage: “Face alcohol fattened, skin pale and loose around the jowls, he'd definitely seen better days. But it was the eyes that did it for me. Down-turned and shimmering as if they were about to liquefy and run down his cheeks.” You've seen this man, either on the street or at your family reunion. You know that he's doomed but he's going to ruin more lives on his way out.

The man dies on same page, clutching an address in his dead hand. Yes, the dying man holding a clue that spurs the protagonist is a cliché, but it still works. Gem follows the clue to the 13^th floor of a building that stands out among modern architecture. Ireland is spinning a bizarre and Gothic tale even as Gem convinces security that he should be allowed onto the 13^th floor.

Unfortunately, the answer to the mystery is less fun than the build-up. The 13^th floor has a passage leading to an underground cavern where a holy man guards the essences of the title, basically he's surrounded by bottles full of “chivalry” and “lust” and “idealism.” The whole scenes is an infodump as the man explains that these bottles literally hold chivalry, etc.

The ending is rushed, but the disappointment comes from the potential. Ireland was leading the reader to something bizarre, only to pull it away. Once Gem destroys the bottle marked “fear,” everything turns into The Purge (seven years before the first movie but essentially the same concept).

Instead of 12 hours of bad behavior, the district is consumed in an orgy of violence and vandalism. Cars drive into storefronts. People rape and loot. Fights break out. A group of employees ge together to throw their boss out the window.

Then it's over. Gem reaches the border and regains his senses. He sees what he's done and wha is sill happening and fears anyone else finding those essences, especially since there are essences in underground bunkers throughout England.

I want more.

Two pages of chaos is not nearly enough. There are so many more possibilities to losing fear. This story should be longer. In fact, it could make a great novel. Fear doesn't just stop people from rape and murder and window breaking. We also fear cancer, telling our best friends that we love them, running naked, pooping on the street and asking for loans. Granted, burning down the local laundromat is dramatic, but calling up someone that you haven't talked to in years to see if they might want to resume a friendship that ended badly is also a decision dominated by fear.

This is almost a great story. I hope that Davin Ireland returns to it one day and turns it into a classic horror novel. It definitely has the potential.

Davin Ireland has also been published in Dark Horses and Age of Artifice.

Again, you can buy BADASS HORROR at Amazon.

Since Xmas is coming up, please buy your Kindle edition of Sugarplum Zombie Motherfuckers to read to the whole family!