The Little People

!!!!SPOILERS!!!

Despite the Nazi Leprechauns on the cover (Gestapochauns? LepreNazis?), this is a book of quiet horror in which Christopher slowly draws his tapestry of flawed characters into a situation that starts out as merely uncanny and then gradually darkens into pure terror. Pure terror filled with Leprechauns...

The other characters come to stay [at the B&B] and then stand around in show more dark rooms after dinner exploring the nooks and crannies of their souls with long internal monologues.

After every nook has been explored at least twice, and each cranny three times, Christopher takes pity and introduces us to the Gestapochauns: a gang of miniature people living in the castle and battling rats with their tiny bullwhips. He then clears the hurdle and jumps the shark all at once by letting us know that these are not just any Nazi leprechauns. These are Jewish psychic Nazi leprechauns who enjoy S&M, are covered with scars from pleasure/pain sessions with their creator, were trained as sex slaves for full-sized human men, and are actually stunted fetuses taken from Jewish concentration camp victims. And one of them is named Adolph.

Take a moment to wipe the sweat from your brow.

While all this information is being hosed into the reader’s eyes like a geyser of crazy, this book rockets from 0 to 60 on the Loony-meter and over-delivers on practically every front.

The Gestapochauns are completely absent from the last 30 pages of this book and it ends on an anticlimactic note, leaving the reader with nothing but the taste of ashes and dashed expectations in their mouths and a distant memory of those 50 pages in the middle when things were happening that are not talked about in respectable homes. show less