Undercover - Tamsyn Muir - ★★★

AUTHOR: Tamsyn Muir

SERIES: Into Shadow, #5

GENRE: Horror Short Story.

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A twisty fantasy-horror short story. Plenty of surprises and also shocks. Too gross for my taste! But might work better for the right reader.

Story Synopsis:

Starr, a newcomer to town, is appointed by a dangerous crime boss to be a bodyguard to her ghoul. The ghoul however turns out to be atypical for her kind, having awareness and control of her surroundings.

I really can’t tell you more. The twists begin very early and it’s better you experience it for yourself.

The story comes to us mostly from the limited third person perspective of Starr.

This short story is a part of ‘Into Shadow’, described by Amazon as ‘an enthralling collection of dark fantasy stories about the lure of forbidden knowledge.’

Y’all! What did I get myself into with this work? 🤢

When I was checking out the ‘Into Shadow’ collection on Prime, I saw that three of the stories had good ratings on Goodreads, and decided to stick only with those. Plus, I have heard much about this author and I found the premise of this tale interesting - what blurb that mentions both ‘burlesque dancer’ and ‘bodyguard to a ghoul’ can be ignored!?

Should have been a memorable work then, right?

Well, it was. But in many of the wrong ways! 👀 I should have taken the word ‘ghoul’ more literally instead of assuming that the blurb writer was being dramatic. What we have in this story is a ghoul. A flesh-eating ghoul. A human-flesh-eating ghoul. Who also eats lizards! Aargh, my poor queasy stomach! 🤢 It’s going to take me a long time to forget the image of a lizard being… let me not describe it else I’ll start grossing myself out once again! It sucks being a visual reader at such times.

As a short story, the plot is pretty appealing. The characters range from underworld gang lord (gang lady, actually) to bodyguards of zombies to… ahem… burlesque ghouls. There is a great lesbian rep in the tale, which is as dark as this author’s works are reputed to be. The relationships are all as twisty as an Indian jalebi.

The title seems innocuous enough, until you realise just how well it suits the story. Quite a few characters are ‘undercover’ in this work, thereby adding a complicated layer to the already tricky plot. It also matches the theme of the ‘Into Shadow’ series well.

I never would have expected a little 59-page story to spring so many surprises. Though it takes a while to figure out the proceedings due to the many characters and the changing narrative point of view, the story is fascinating once you get a handle on things. However, the second half seems to have some big jumps in the plot flow. So much so that I am not even sure I understood the story entirely because I am left with plenty of questions.

I think this was too ambitious for a short work. It has tremendous potential to work at least as a novella, if not a novel. The concept, the characters, and the writing all would have worked better if they had more page space. Of course, I must also admit that were it actually a novel, I would have never read it. Me no do zombie novels. 👀

All in all, excellent imagination, great storyline, good writing, few plot gaps. Might work very well for those built with a strong stomach. The rest of you, go ‘undercover‘ and hide from this little story of horrors!

Hitting the midway mark because I know this just wasn’t my cup of tea but it had its impactful moments.

This standalone work is the fifth story in the ‘Into Shadow’ collection, and is currently available free to Amazon Prime subscribers.