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When home decor gets homicidal

[note: trigger warning. If you are a recovering DIY enthusiast, you may wish to skip this bit and head straight down to the book review below. Because it’s true: your house does actually want you dead.]

I don’t know what the Hub was going on about. Our current walk-in closet system was working fine. Okay, so it was a spare bedroom with our clothes in laundry baskets and a cheap clothes rack.  But I was really going to get around to buying some actual wardrobes, and anyway we had just moved in. Oh wait… Five years ago? How did that happen?

So I set up an alert on eBay, and sat back to wait for the perfect pair of matching wardrobes to show up. And waited… And waited… Finally, I got a message. A gorgeous pair of carved mahogany antique wardrobes was practically being given away. The facts that they were over nine feet tall, each weighed more than a healthy elephant, and they would have to be hauled to the top of our four-story townhouse were mere details. After forking over a king’s ransom to ship our “practically free” wardrobes, they finally arrived. In pieces. Lots of pieces, because they had been completely disassembled. We stared at the mahogany mountain of carved bits, and turned back to our laundry-baskets.

Eventually, we found people willing to assemble the astonishingly heavy bits into a pair of wardrobes. The dog and I arrived after our helpers left,  so I don’t know if the members of the assembly team were still able to walk or sire children. But as I looked at our actual, grownup wardrobes, I decided to surprise the Hub by moving our clothes to their respective wardrobe-homes.

No good deed goes unpunished.

I had to use a stepstool to reach the hangers in the ridiculously tall wardrobe assigned to the Hub. I opened the door of his wardrobe, not sure if it contained an entrance to Narnia or perhaps Hogwarts. I was standing on the stool looking for Mr. Tumnus when I noticed the wardrobe was shifting. I put both hands out to steady it, but it was like trying to hold back an oceanliner. As the entire weight of the massive structure slowly moved toward me, my arms buckled.

This was it, I realized. I wouldn’t be able stop it from smashing into me. I’ve always wondered what would happen in those final moments. Would my life flash before my eyes? Would I think of family and friends? My dog? Things I still wanted to write?

Turns out, not so much. In fact, the one thing I thought of was that after they dug my flattened corpse out from beneath our homicidal new furniture, it was definitely going to have to be a closed coffin funeral.

Instead, a miracle happened. The beefy door to the wardrobe swung open and wedged itself into the floor, stopping the murderous descent and saving my life. (Let’s just not think about what it did to our new wood floors.) I was saved!

You would think a near-death experience would change my approach to life. And it did. No, I’m not going to cure cancer or volunteer to de-worm orphans in some third-world country. (Remember, I’m the woman who used the supposed last moments of her life to picture a smashed corpse funeral instead of reflecting on the real meaning of love and friendship.)

Instead, I decided to catch up with quick reviews of recent reads. Lucky you! Instead of avoiding my closed-coffin funeral, you get to find out about these amazing books, beginning with inexcusably delayed comments on Terry Tyler’s terrifying post-apocalyptic SFV-1 series, and continuing with more reviews in upcoming posts.

Meanwhile, I’m going to check out the other wardrobe. I think I see a lamp post inside…

BLURB:

Infected and Darkness, Books 1 and 2 of SFV-1 Series by Terry Tyler

‘Every time someone gets bitten, that’s one more of them, and one less of us.’

MY REVIEW:

5 stars for Infected and Darkness, Books 1 and 2 of SFV-1 Series by Terry Tyler

I’m afraid of author Terry Tyler. She writes about post-apocalyptic, dystopian pandemics set about a day after ours — and a year later they occur. No, seriously. The things she writes happen. And okay, they happen more, their reach is more ubiquitous, their legacy more pervasive, their consequences more devastating. The point is, she pretty much nails it.

So when Terry Tyler wrote about the zombie rage virus apocalypse, I sat up and listened. A mysterious virus that comes from a remote site, sweeps through the world, and resists any government’s attempts to control it? Check. A worldwide pandemic that stops civilization in its tracks? Check, check. A new reality where a rapidly-dwindling number of survivors must relearn or reinvent everything they knew about who they are and what they do? Uh-oh…

As a writer, Terry’s genius is for character creation and development. In Book 1 of the series, Infected, she tells the stories of a few people caught up in the devastation. Cat, a young mother in England, escapes the beginning of the virus because she’s agreed to spend a year as a reality TV contestant living on an isolated island. Norah is an artist so absorbed in her work that she ignores her boyfriend’s terror of the impending virus. Lion is a marketing consultant on a break with his partner’s family in northern Cumbria.

In order to stay alive, each must accept the loss of the people and lives they loved to become a person they never could have imagined: murderer, warrior, pragmatist.

I’m about to make my home in a strange place with people I hardly know, a weird little group brought together by circumstance rather than choice. I haven’t got a clue what path my life will take next, or if I will be alive this time next year. Or next week, or even tomorrow. If I’m still going to be Norah Wood, artist, or if I’ll become Norah Wood, apocalypse warrior—or ex-Norah Wood, SFV-1 victim, roaming the countryside with eyes filled with blood.” — Terry Tyler. Infected: SFV-1 Series – BOOK ONE (p. 153). Kindle Edition.

Their stories continue in Book 2, Darkness. Each of them must come to terms not only with what they’ve lost, but with what they’ve become.

“I like this,” Brian says to me one afternoon, as we’re cycling along in a gentle fashion, hoping to find shelter before the grey clouds open up and drench us. “It’s better than getting into a car and just driving. And I like the feeling of living more closely with the land, even though it’s harder.” “Uh, yeah. Eating Heinz ravioli cold out of the tin, that’s really being at one with nature.” He laughs and rides off, the wind blowing through his hair. I do know what he means, though. Before, we never had to think about survival itself. We just lived, with every need catered for. The Western world was like that for such a brief time in the history of our species, and may not be so again for a long time. We were lucky to have known that fleeting moment in time; we should be amazed it ever existed, not in shock because it’s over.” —Tyler, Terry. Darkness: SFV-1 Series – BOOK TWO (p. 190). Kindle Edition.

And that’s the scary genius of Terry Tyler. She creates instant, believable characters and makes them the people we know. The people we are. She takes us from imagining a scenario — say, a global pandemic — and shows it happening to a bunch of ordinary people just like us. Just like me. Only next thing we know, those people are fighting for their lives against their neighbors, friends, loved ones. I’m watching all of them in horrified fascination, because if they can survive, maybe I could too.

And then it happens. An ACTUAL pandemic, just the way Terry predicted it. We’re hearing news stories of incredibly infectious new strains, with no viable vaccine or cure. I can’t recommend this series highly enough. Terry builds a world of completely believable characters in a situation we are all starting to realize could happen. And the only thing we can do is root for the characters in the first two books of this series, and hope like hell there will be some kind of resolution in the third book, Reset, that she promises is about to be released.

I’m just going to hide in my house until then. But you better believe I’ll have my big kitchen knife and heaviest cast iron skillet to hand.

 

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