“Generally you don’t see that kind of behavior in a major appliance.”

24. The Painted Darkness – Brian James Freeman

I was not so much enchanted with this as I was a little perplexed. It’s sort of a cozy horror story and I really wanted it to be darker than it was, even though it would be plenty dark enough for some people with the beast in the basement and the melting flesh and stepping on broken glass and the apparently very bloody paintings and an impending (probably) divorce.

Anyway though, dude paints in his attic studio (lucky, I bet the light’s awesome) and gets completely carried away much of the time. His family does not think that is a good thing and it is pretty unprofessional, time management is a skill and a virtue. Anyway, his wife leaves the house and takes their child very pointedly and dude needs to make sure to bleed the boiler or it will explode the house. He knows this, and yet, he forgets because he’s in the zone painting this princess fighting a monster. This is where I was wanting it to be darker. It’s like everything else he paints is the wall from Hellraiser asking for help in blood and this is a fighting princess and a monster, which just rang not quite scary dark to me.

The boiler in serious need of maintenance at all times and his childhood have intermingling memories of when his father was murdered by one of those same boilers and now he’s in a pickle because he got lost in the princess painting. He’s also going through traumatic memories and the basement is way creepier than usual…and bloody…and if you want to take this as a tale with a teensy moral, it’s “learn to manage your time and set an alarm so you can respect others’ time, not lose your family by being stuck in your own head, and not blow up your house.” There’s more to the actual story than my teensy moral, but I ended up kind of staying on the surface, probably because of the princess painting. And because I understand losing time to creative pursuits and having extremely unpleasant memories to say the least, but, I would’ve made it a point to set an alarm for the boiler. An exploded studio is not useful.

Danger Crumples was all the princess I ever needed since all my ladypigs were (and are) queens.