Review: Only My Eyes Move by Stuart Tudor
Blurb:
When a puppet becomes self-aware, can it prove its sentience to its puppeteer before a show?
All is dark when Billy awakes. He doesn’t know where or what he is. All he knows is he can only move his eyes, the rest of his body is attached to strange trends, keeping him trapped.
They must be cut.
There is a man who knows him, but Billy doesn’t know who the man is. He might just be the key for Billy to escape the hell he has woken up to. But how can he do that when he can’t even speak?
Billy has to find a way to speak, or he will stay as a helpless observer of his own existence.
Only My Eyes Move is the first entry in the Eight Nightmares Collection, a collection of horror stories about the dreamlike, the surreal, and encounters with the fantastical. Only My Eyes Move is rated R for child torture, existential horror and entrappment. Reader discretion is advised.
Review:
Our story here starts off somewhere… strange. Somewhere hard, and cold, and distant. Immediately we are infused with dread and foreboding, and there is nothing we can do to stop those feelings from fully realizing themselves.
Only My Eyes Move is a horror short story, the first entry in the Eight Nightmares collection, and what a nightmare it is, full of terrible visuals and implications that had me peeking over the covers from page to page. This is a short one, so my review will be short and spare you most of the details to 1; not spoil it, and 2; make you read it.
This is a story similar to sleep paralysis, where we are conscious, observant, horrified passengers in a moment that we ought to be in control of. Yet we aren’t. We’re puppets, moved at the strings of unseen masters, dancing to their tune, watching in horror as our humanity is stripped of us. I’ve never had sleep paralysis, but now I DEFINITELY don’t want to.
That said, this was a very interesting read, one that was truly horrifying from the front cover to the back. I’m not a big horror reader, nor am I big a short story reader, but Stuart was able to overcome those two obstacles and write a truly enjoyable experience (being horrified is enjoyable, right?) that I highly recommend.
