Occultober Day 1: The Graveyard Shift by D.M. Guay

Occultober Day 1: The Graveyard Shift by D.M. Guay

Welcome to Occultober 2022! Over the course of this month, I’m going to introduce you to 31 books or series that play with the horrific and the supernatural—sometimes straight up and sometimes with dark humor. You know what I mean, these are the books that delve into the darker side of fantasy and fiction and often get downright spooky. So, secure your shutters and light the candles as you prepare yourself for 31 dark and stormy adventures.

 

And if you like what you see, please feel free to leave a comment, share the review, or even recommend a book you think I might want to feature in next year’s Occultober event. Let’s face it, anyone interested in this event will appreciate a good recommendation.

 

Now, to launch all of the spookiness for 2022, I have chosen The Graveyard Shift, the opening book of one of my favorite series. In it, author D.M. Guay manages to take the spookiest of settings—a small 7-11-esq market that is in actuality a gateway to hell—and make it a source of some wonderful dark humor.

 

Now, I should point out that I don’t usually get the comedy in most comedic books. Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem in The Graveyard Shift. I was laughing from the first chapters and sharing the jokes with my son who would laugh uproariously at them second hand. Guay has a gift for the absurd and it really works in this first book of her 24/7 Demon Mart series.

 

The hero (Lloyd) is a loser. It’s not nice to say, but even he recognizes it. His major problem would appear to be pure laziness coupled with a remarkable lack of even a modicum of ambition. He seems essentially happy living in his parents’ house, playing video games, and going every night to a convenience store to sample one of their 100+ varieties of slushies. Oh, and I should also mention, that he is really, really, stupid. I’m not saying he has a low IQ, just that he’s really amazingly dumb—but weirdly enough, in a totally believable way.

 

So, here’s the set up. Lloyd goes into the convenience store where he has a schoolboy crush on one of the attendants who probably doesn’t know he exists, and while he’s there a demonic snake creature appears and tries to escape the store. Lloyd helps his fantasy crush stop this from happening. In addition to the snake creature, genuine magic is displayed. Keep this in mind for later.

 

The long and the short of it is that the store owner rewards Lloyd for his help by offering him a job at an extraordinarily good hourly rate. Since Lloyd is in desperate debt, and it will let him be near his crush, he accepts. It is very clear to the reader, and in all fairness, the demon hiring Lloyd tells him this, that this store is not a normal place. There are genuine threats to life and limb here. There are demons involved. But Lloyd immediately zones out on the training video and never does get around to reading his employee handbook which tells him how to survive these dangers. He also has a really hard time accepting that the supernatural is in play in this store. All of which produces hilarious situation after hilarious situation in a setting that is perfect for Halloween. It’s as if Lloyd just can’t process magic and the supernatural even when he keeps seeing it.

 

Guay also manages to show Lloyd growing as a person without having him overcome the qualities that have made him basically unsuccessful so far in life. So, it’s sweet when his mother’s sheer joy that he has gotten a job keeps him from quitting. And it’s also nice to see him starting to want the things that other adults around him desire. Oh, and I should mention that even though Lloyd thinks he is a coward, he’s actually intensely brave and steps up when he has to. And again, credit to the author, this is done in a very believable way.

 

The Graveyard Shift is not the spookiest of books, but its firm setting in the supernatural make it the perfect book to launch this year’s Occultober.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

 

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