An Appetite Without a Self

Some men arrive at the worst thing by feeling. Eli Brandt arrived at it by arithmetic.

He has gone over the sum many times, in the careful, patient way of a man who no longer expects to be argued out of it, and every time it comes out the same. The people he loves are heavier for him. His wife is tired in a way he is sure he caused. His brother would be lighter without his weight. The correct and merciful thing, the only thing the arithmetic allows, is to subtract himself from the lives he is sure he is spoiling. He does not call this despair. He calls it accuracy.

So he comes to a small, clean room with a fluorescent tube overhead and the blinds half-drawn on a gray afternoon, the kind of room built for exactly one purpose: so that a person can say, out loud, to another person who will not look away, the worst true thing he knows. And he says it, plainly, in a voice gone very even, the voice of a man who has stopped arguing and is only reporting the verdict.

But the room holds more than the careful woman with the pad on her knee. Something has come to the sound of Eli's confession, drawn across by it, hungry for it in a way it does not name. It settles in to listen with a cold and total attention that owes him nothing. It begins to weigh him, to take his measure, to move through the rooms of his life looking for the thing it has come to find. And as it works, patient and unhurried and entirely without warmth, it arrives at conclusions about a suffering human being that the man himself will never hear, and that the reader cannot stop hearing.

An Appetite Without a Self is quiet horror at its coldest and most cerebral: a slow, restrained, deeply interior novella about confession, self-erasure, and the terror of being seen and measured by something that gives you nothing back. There is no gore here and no spectacle, only the patient accumulation of dread inside a bright clean room, the calm of a mind reasoning where a mind should recoil, and the oldest cold question a person can be made to answer: whose was the darkness, and what is owed for a hunger it did not author. For readers who love the philosophical dread of Thomas Ligotti, the ordinary menace of Shirley Jackson, and the cold interiority of Iain Reid and Catriona Ward.

Read it under the brightest light you have. The dark was never the frightening part.