Publication: November 30th 2020 by Beneath Hell Publishing
"We’d been in the house two weeks when Tommy pulled the first bones from the garden.”
When Cassie Baker buys the house on Cedar Street, it’s partly because it reminds her of the house she grew up in in the ‘80s. It reminds her of happier times, when her Mom was still alive, before the cancer had taken her. It seems like the perfect place to raise her baby boy, Sam.
That is, until a friend unearths the remains of a dog, buried in a shallow grave in the backyard.
After the bones come the cockroaches…
The Cockroach King is a new novella written by Andrew Cull, the award-winning author of Remains and Bones.
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Cockroaches are one of those bugs that most people hate and of which even more have a phobia, with good reason. They hide in the walls proliferating unseen, scattering when exposed to the light, invading our spaces. The Cockroach King not only plays with our innate revulsion of these scuttling six-legged pests, it quickly escalates it. At only 65 pages, this is one novella that excels at tending a feeling of dread and then coaxing it into an inferno of unease.
Cassie is a single mother, intent on raising her little boy Sam and creating a life. Told from the first-person view, we quickly feel for her. She's just poured everything she has into their very first home after the death of her mother. She's so well written. She's relatable and her grief is familiar. There's a strength to her that you find yourself quickly cheering for. You want her to succeed and something is standing in the way of her hopes and dreams as Cassie soon finds that their house isn't quite the home-sweet-home that she'd hoped it would be.
From the very first line—“We’d been in the house two weeks when Tommy pulled the first bones from the garden.”—Cull sets the scene for something foreboding and insidious. This is such a creepy little read. The characters are intimate and the pacing is excellent. The writing is deliberate and invokes such great visceral reactions while reading. The tension builds as the reader is given more questions than answers until it all comes down in a culmination of exposed horrific secrets.
Interestingly enough, while I was writing this review, my husband came in from outside with an odd discovery: a tiny skull in his hand that he found lying next to the driveway. We've had numerous pet rats throughout the years and they are all buried in the flower garden. I went outside expecting to find the rock pile set on top disturbed and the burial hole open; It was not. I don't know how the skull got where it was but I find any roaches in my house, you can bet I will bug-bomb this sucker to kingdom come.
