Igor thrrooowwwww the switch!!! Park is well and truly the mad scientist of the horror fiction world. Cackling like a lunatic as his ideas manifest into something of almost flesh-and-bone substance. A piece of inspired writing, stepping outside the constraints of standard literary construction. A piece of chilling, sinister and unequivocally evocative literary art if you will.

Does all that sound a bit ‘out there’? Perhaps a reviewer’s hyperbole in an effort to whet a readers’ appetite, promoting their hopeful next read? If that’s your initial thoughts, then you’re probably not yet accustomed to Park’s monstrous creativity. His inspired warping of the norm. You can take nothing for granted. This man sculpts his own literary devices. Cuts through the quagmire of established writing techniques, to expose new untrodden paths. A germ of an idea which this modern-day Frankenstein has given life to.

Essentially, we have two stories running parallel to each other. We have Andrew, sitting alone in a security hut, the gate he’s tasked with watching facing him, and high-security fencing bordering the encircling woodlands. Night has fallen and the sense of isolation, is palpable and increasingly unnerving. Our character feels this unease taking root inside him. Unsettling the man, who’s already finding himself feeling ill-prepared. The task should be simple, but his sense of dread is now getting the better of him.

The second story, a story within a story if you will, is told through the pages of the paperback which Andrew has begun to read to try to escape his growing anxiety. An explosive pulp-horror, nestled somewhere between ‘The Thing’ (1982), Toby Wilkins’ ‘Splinter’ (2008) and the ‘Resident Evil’ franchise. Only this out-of-this-world sci-fi horror has been given a Shaun Hutson edge for an added action-packed delivery. Oh yes, Park can deliver pulp horror! We know this. Pulp runs deep in Park’s DNA.

What do these two stories, jumping back and forth between each other, ultimately offer us? On the one side we have a quiet, internal horror. A slowly escalating feeling of dread married with an all-too-familiar feeling of inadequacy. Being ill-equipped and thrown in at the deep end. It’s that sense of being outside your comfort zone and thinking somehow, you’re just fucking up the simplest of tasks. Letting someone down. Your family, those you report to, yourself.

Juxtaposition that quiet horror with the absolute insanity of a high-octane pulp horror. Yeah, we have prisoner break outs, wild alien mutations, and high-speed getaways. The whole shebang! 

Yeah, yeah, yeah…I know what you’re now thinking! The twin stories are gonna converge. One will bleed into the other, or some such cunning piece of merging. I’ll neither confirm nor deny your predictions. But what I will say, is the twist Park has in store for you, sure ain’t going to be on your radar. It had me. I paused, cast my mind back through the pages I’d just ploughed through, and chuckled as the craftiness of this silver-haired writing genius.

Fuck me, “It's Alive, It Lives!”. The mad scientist of the literary world has absolutely nailed it again. His lunatic ideas have sat bolt upright, whilst Park proudly stands back, cackling with maniacal glee at his terrifying creation.

He’s a clever, cunning, diabolical madman, alright. A writer of shrewd, careful calculations, who plots against you. You see, the novella purposefully uses your own assumptions against you, knocking you squarely off a perceived pathway, exactly when Park has decided the time is right.

The end result is nothing short of an unnerving, ambitious, but perfectly delivered piece of dark literary art.

The novella runs for a total of 65 pages.

Ideas are a strange thing! Following on from the novella we have Park delivering a short insight into how this wild conceptual piece of fiction came to be. For this Park tells us how the story was never planned to be a novella, but rather, a mere short story. However, during the course of toying with the overarching concept (a story within a story), the idea manifested itself into something richer in plot and body. It became a converging of ideas which ultimately led to this full-bodied novella.

Through this exploration Park takes us on a whistle stop tour of the story’s evolution, from the initial conception which we see within the previously unpublished short story ‘Cow’ (which is also included in this book), to the subsequent ‘test piece’ which we see in the short story ‘The Last Horror Story’, which was originally published in ‘The Black Room Manuscripts: Volume Four’ (2018).

All though this Park details his inspirations and influences, from the indie rock band Oasis, to the quiet horror of Tracy Fahey and James Everington, and onto the pulpy-tough-guy character voice exhibited in Kit Power’s work.

Honestly, this whole debrief is a magnificent touch after your brain has been hot-wired and reset by this veritable lunatic. And the whole thing’s written in such a candid, open and genuinely sincere way. It’s feels almost akin to a magician divulging how the trick was done.

It turns out the mad scientist is a flesh-and-blood human after all.

After a short introduction to this micro-story, we’re plunged straight into a quietly unnerving setting of mother and daughter, who’ve recently encountered a sick cow. Now the daughter is sick. We know where this is probably leading. But it’s the quietness, the quaintness of the piece that really gets under your skin. That, and the subtle but oh-so-fucking prominent link with those almost whispered words of the story-within-a-story, which seem to roar at you from the barely broken silence of the tranquil, evocative and pastel-coloured setting. Yikes!