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The Eight Eyes That Watch You Die
BEHOLD! THE EYES OF THE NIGHTMARE AGE!
Gather here for the story of Arcana! It is told that long ago the web of her shadow brought about pure darkness and, in her death, she hid her eight eyes throughout the world, sought after by the Unbroken Weave and their band of silk addicts.
Look within and gaze upon her eyes: A boy whose words will shock and awe any ears who dare to listen! A junkie on a mission to smuggle the unthinkable for the Unbroken Weave! Girls searching far and wide for the mythological Dream Dress, no matter the cost!
All this and more await those who dare to seek the eight eyes that watched us die. Come! And see...
Gather here for the story of Arcana! It is told that long ago the web of her shadow brought about pure darkness and, in her death, she hid her eight eyes throughout the world, sought after by the Unbroken Weave and their band of silk addicts.
Look within and gaze upon her eyes: A boy whose words will shock and awe any ears who dare to listen! A junkie on a mission to smuggle the unthinkable for the Unbroken Weave! Girls searching far and wide for the mythological Dream Dress, no matter the cost!
All this and more await those who dare to seek the eight eyes that watched us die. Come! And see...
- GenresHorror
328 pages, Paperback
Published October 22, 2019
2 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 17, 2019
In my role as a Patreon supporter of this book's publisher (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing,) I'm allowed one (1) free ebook per month as a "perk." (Those aren't sarcasm quotes, okay, it's the difference between a term and terminology.)
The Eight Eyes That Watch You Die was released in late October, actually--just under two months ago, as of this writing--but I gave it a pass when I saw it on the lineup then. A short story collection about spiders, and each installment was written by the same author?
Comoffit, man.
For one thing, lookit, I live in a "garden apartment" (those are sarcasm quotes) in a "character building" (see previous,) okay, I've been here for almost thirteen (13) years now, I've had more spiders for friends than I've had people, at this point. If I were remotely afraid of them, I'd have died long ago.
For another, you're far less likely to waste your time on a short story collection with numerous contributors, you know, it's going to be hit and miss for you regardless, but… it is hit sometimes. I liked some of the pizza stories I read, some of the truckers stories I read, some of the professional wrestlers stories I read.
But then!
The other night, I happened to listen to an episode of GHOULISH (one of the podcasts hosted by author Max Booth III, who runs PMMP with fellow author Lori Michelle) when he had Mr. W.P. Johnson (author of the spiders collection) on. They shared real-life spider stories*, and told corny spider jokes, and talked about the book, mentioning in passing that it'd be neat if more people reviewed it.
Just saying you'd like some reviews means bupkis to me by and large, okay, I hardly ever write reviews for indies and/or self-published books if I don't like them--we got enough problems, if you ask me--and like I say, up till then I was disinclined to read this gentleman's spiders book, so: tough totem, mainly.
What made a difference to me first of all was, Mr. Johnson was very funny and charming and colourful on GHOULISH; the scuttlebuns is Mr. Booth takes care not to book writers who might bore your bewbs off, no matter how good they are.
Secondly, although they didn't go into tremendous detail about the subject matter of the spiders book (that I can recall, any road) it was plain to me that this wasn't, like, a book about evil spiders. (Or if it was, not evil spiders in the Giant Spider Invasion mold, at least.)
Finally, YMMV, as always, but Mr. Booth and M/s Michelle take a lot of pride in their work, okay, both as authors and as publishers. It's not at all uncommon for Mr. Booth to get way crusty over some author or other who's clowning up the profession, in their work and/or their behaviour. PMMP isn't rolling in dough, but neither are they just publishing whatever the fuck to make a quota or a sales goal, is what I'm saying. They wouldn't publish something they didn't believe in, much less promote it. (Or if they would, it doesn't show.)
So: I asked for Mr. Johnson's spiders book for my December "perk," and I read it, and yeah.
The bad news is, it has maybe eight or nine typos in it. What I love about that is, it's so beautifully, smartly, confidently written overall that its very very few typos really stand out, you know, it's fair to say that (for me at least) they emphasized the general excellence of the writing.
Kind of like when you're listening to a live performance of "Unchained Melody" so transcendent that it gives you goosebumps… until the singer doesn't quite hit the high note near the end. So close! So perfect otherwise! Life is a cabernet.
(Of course I can fucking hit it. My voice isn't transcendent, but it gets the job done. Don't test me. I'll flip ya. I'll flip ya for real.)
The good news is, The Eight Eyes That Watch You Die is a spiders book similar to how Troll 2 is a trolls movie. (Similar, I said. In its sensibility, I meant. Not in quality.) There are spiders in the book, here and there, but it's far less about spiders than it is about love, addiction, art, conformity, transformation, redemption, (theoretical) damnation, loneliness, obsession…
And body horror. Tons and tons of body horror. I'm especially glad to have been surprised by that, because I avoid body horror normally, since I'm already so squeamish about my own body, here in my own real life, every day. (I'm not a leper or a tree man or anything, but when my body decides to be gross, it super-sizes everything, sir.)
The spiders aren't shoe-horned in, don't worry, nobody's saying that. It's just that they're more of a theme than they are a subject, you know, all the stories occur in a shared universe of which Mr. Johnson's ideas about these particular spiders are a big (if shadowy) part, but the stories arise out of the worlds he's built rather than from any sort of concrete commitment to their unifying element.
Mr. Johnson's book is smart, and beautiful, and sad, and incredibly, impressively creative. His prose is assured and original, his pacing is immaculate, and his characterization is astonishing, you know, it's not every day that you find dense, three-dimensional characterization in any short stories, and a lot of genre fiction (to me) seems to lean much harder on the subject matter.
It's just a wonderful book, so well-done that every story manifested in my imagination fully-formed, full-colour, five senses, seamless. I had no questions, I raised no objections (and I'm a mean-spirited, nitpicky jerk, ask anyone) and best of all, I came away from it feeling like I've been giving books short shrift my whole entire life, and no matter when I die, I won't live long enough to make it up to everyone.
But I can try.
* My one and only spider story is this: when I was maybe five or six years old, a spider bit me in the face, big and hard enough to leave a scar you can still see today, in my twilight years. Sure, everyone's going to be sampled by bugs at some point, probably, but when it happened to me, my sister (eight years my senior) told me the spider had laid an egg in me, and soon millions of baby spiders would explode out of my face. Neat!
The Eight Eyes That Watch You Die was released in late October, actually--just under two months ago, as of this writing--but I gave it a pass when I saw it on the lineup then. A short story collection about spiders, and each installment was written by the same author?
Comoffit, man.
For one thing, lookit, I live in a "garden apartment" (those are sarcasm quotes) in a "character building" (see previous,) okay, I've been here for almost thirteen (13) years now, I've had more spiders for friends than I've had people, at this point. If I were remotely afraid of them, I'd have died long ago.
For another, you're far less likely to waste your time on a short story collection with numerous contributors, you know, it's going to be hit and miss for you regardless, but… it is hit sometimes. I liked some of the pizza stories I read, some of the truckers stories I read, some of the professional wrestlers stories I read.
But then!
The other night, I happened to listen to an episode of GHOULISH (one of the podcasts hosted by author Max Booth III, who runs PMMP with fellow author Lori Michelle) when he had Mr. W.P. Johnson (author of the spiders collection) on. They shared real-life spider stories*, and told corny spider jokes, and talked about the book, mentioning in passing that it'd be neat if more people reviewed it.
Just saying you'd like some reviews means bupkis to me by and large, okay, I hardly ever write reviews for indies and/or self-published books if I don't like them--we got enough problems, if you ask me--and like I say, up till then I was disinclined to read this gentleman's spiders book, so: tough totem, mainly.
What made a difference to me first of all was, Mr. Johnson was very funny and charming and colourful on GHOULISH; the scuttlebuns is Mr. Booth takes care not to book writers who might bore your bewbs off, no matter how good they are.
Secondly, although they didn't go into tremendous detail about the subject matter of the spiders book (that I can recall, any road) it was plain to me that this wasn't, like, a book about evil spiders. (Or if it was, not evil spiders in the Giant Spider Invasion mold, at least.)
Finally, YMMV, as always, but Mr. Booth and M/s Michelle take a lot of pride in their work, okay, both as authors and as publishers. It's not at all uncommon for Mr. Booth to get way crusty over some author or other who's clowning up the profession, in their work and/or their behaviour. PMMP isn't rolling in dough, but neither are they just publishing whatever the fuck to make a quota or a sales goal, is what I'm saying. They wouldn't publish something they didn't believe in, much less promote it. (Or if they would, it doesn't show.)
So: I asked for Mr. Johnson's spiders book for my December "perk," and I read it, and yeah.
The bad news is, it has maybe eight or nine typos in it. What I love about that is, it's so beautifully, smartly, confidently written overall that its very very few typos really stand out, you know, it's fair to say that (for me at least) they emphasized the general excellence of the writing.
Kind of like when you're listening to a live performance of "Unchained Melody" so transcendent that it gives you goosebumps… until the singer doesn't quite hit the high note near the end. So close! So perfect otherwise! Life is a cabernet.
(Of course I can fucking hit it. My voice isn't transcendent, but it gets the job done. Don't test me. I'll flip ya. I'll flip ya for real.)
The good news is, The Eight Eyes That Watch You Die is a spiders book similar to how Troll 2 is a trolls movie. (Similar, I said. In its sensibility, I meant. Not in quality.) There are spiders in the book, here and there, but it's far less about spiders than it is about love, addiction, art, conformity, transformation, redemption, (theoretical) damnation, loneliness, obsession…
And body horror. Tons and tons of body horror. I'm especially glad to have been surprised by that, because I avoid body horror normally, since I'm already so squeamish about my own body, here in my own real life, every day. (I'm not a leper or a tree man or anything, but when my body decides to be gross, it super-sizes everything, sir.)
The spiders aren't shoe-horned in, don't worry, nobody's saying that. It's just that they're more of a theme than they are a subject, you know, all the stories occur in a shared universe of which Mr. Johnson's ideas about these particular spiders are a big (if shadowy) part, but the stories arise out of the worlds he's built rather than from any sort of concrete commitment to their unifying element.
Mr. Johnson's book is smart, and beautiful, and sad, and incredibly, impressively creative. His prose is assured and original, his pacing is immaculate, and his characterization is astonishing, you know, it's not every day that you find dense, three-dimensional characterization in any short stories, and a lot of genre fiction (to me) seems to lean much harder on the subject matter.
It's just a wonderful book, so well-done that every story manifested in my imagination fully-formed, full-colour, five senses, seamless. I had no questions, I raised no objections (and I'm a mean-spirited, nitpicky jerk, ask anyone) and best of all, I came away from it feeling like I've been giving books short shrift my whole entire life, and no matter when I die, I won't live long enough to make it up to everyone.
But I can try.
* My one and only spider story is this: when I was maybe five or six years old, a spider bit me in the face, big and hard enough to leave a scar you can still see today, in my twilight years. Sure, everyone's going to be sampled by bugs at some point, probably, but when it happened to me, my sister (eight years my senior) told me the spider had laid an egg in me, and soon millions of baby spiders would explode out of my face. Neat!
August 5, 2020
A wonderful collection. And yes, this is a short story collection. Know that entering. However, all the stories exist within the same world making the move from one to another seamless. Johnson's writing is excellent. He cares about what he's doing and the effort he puts into it shows. The stories within are full of body horror, but also real emotion and beautiful writing. It was a treat to read.
November 9, 2020
The Eight Eyes that Watch You Die. First, what a great title. Second, weaving these 8 stories together that are so different, is truly impressive. I do not like spiders and I think that made some moments within truly horrifying. I'm not sure if this falls under the "cosmic" horror sub-genre, but that's how I'd best describe it. Don't pass this one up!
October 31, 2019
3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars.
Originally when I received the book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review, I thought it was a stand-alone novel. As I started reading, I realized it was a short collection of stories in one novel written by one author. Admittedly, I was disappointed to learn that when I first start the novel. As I reached the ending, I wasn't disappointed anymore. Even though it was a collection of short stories, they are all related in the same universe somehow.
"A Walking Shadow" is the main story in this novel. It was being split in between short stories and I understood why. I have never seen that kind of book that was written that way. I did enjoy "A Walking Shadow" throughout the book, but I didn't like how it ended. I felt that there was more to it, but the author chose to end it right there. That was the main reason why it dropped a star and a half.
"Bitten" was hauntingly read. It reminded me of a short video I have seen a while ago that talks about a box. A young boy begged a stranger what was in the box and then the stranger showed it to the boy. The boy ended up going on a hunger strike unintentionally. When the rest of the family know what was in it, they followed the same way the book has been acting. It was similar to Bitten. It was creepy as heck and a great way to start the novel with its first short story of the collection.
"The God of Dead Dreamers" was really interesting. It is hard for me to write a review without spoiling anything, but it talks about a junkie that was forced to be clean so he could do a job. The job went badly to the point where I learned what the theme of the book was about. I don't think I'll look at Bloody Mary drinks the same ever again and I don't even drink it. But the thought of seeing it at bars or brunches gave me a goosebump.
"Dream Dress" could be better but it honestly has a strong plot compare to other stories. I still don't understand what lolita dresses were. But again, I'm not a fashion person and it wasn't the real theme of this story anyway. The ending of the story was insane and made me loved the story the best.
"The Laughing Tree" was an okay story and I think it would be better if it was stretch out and makes it a stand-alone novella instead of fast-forwarding to future. The opening was the best in my opinion because it showed how childish the boys were before they met a witch, which of course changed their life forever. I mainly want more depth on the apocalypse part of the story. It just fast-forwards years later too much. It is what ruins the pleasure of reading for me. The main character's fate was a tragedy, which probably saved the story somehow.
"Static: The Life and Works of Z" kept me interested because it has a different writing style. It was all from the interviews, letters, and recordings. It made me feel like I was watching a true story of mystery crime or something close to that. The ending was a bit weak, but it was later explained clearly in one of the short stories in"A Walking Shadow". If it wasn't for an explanation in "A Walking Shadow", this short story will have a lower rating.
"Shelob Headlines the Ox" is probably one of my favorite short stories in this novel. It haunted the depression of a trans and how she dealt with what was happening. The spider part was crazy and it does change the main character's personality. This story surprisingly has a happy for now ending when I thought there was no hope for her.
"Julie's Scars" was the weakest of the whole short stories in the collection. I didn't even enjoy how the story ended. It also was my first time to read it in script format and I think I will enjoy if it has a better ending. That was the only negative outcome of this story. I still am unclear on who was the Unholy Ghost.
Every story has something to do with spiders, which make it creepier. Highly recommended!
Originally when I received the book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review, I thought it was a stand-alone novel. As I started reading, I realized it was a short collection of stories in one novel written by one author. Admittedly, I was disappointed to learn that when I first start the novel. As I reached the ending, I wasn't disappointed anymore. Even though it was a collection of short stories, they are all related in the same universe somehow.
"A Walking Shadow" is the main story in this novel. It was being split in between short stories and I understood why. I have never seen that kind of book that was written that way. I did enjoy "A Walking Shadow" throughout the book, but I didn't like how it ended. I felt that there was more to it, but the author chose to end it right there. That was the main reason why it dropped a star and a half.
"Bitten" was hauntingly read. It reminded me of a short video I have seen a while ago that talks about a box. A young boy begged a stranger what was in the box and then the stranger showed it to the boy. The boy ended up going on a hunger strike unintentionally. When the rest of the family know what was in it, they followed the same way the book has been acting. It was similar to Bitten. It was creepy as heck and a great way to start the novel with its first short story of the collection.
"The God of Dead Dreamers" was really interesting. It is hard for me to write a review without spoiling anything, but it talks about a junkie that was forced to be clean so he could do a job. The job went badly to the point where I learned what the theme of the book was about. I don't think I'll look at Bloody Mary drinks the same ever again and I don't even drink it. But the thought of seeing it at bars or brunches gave me a goosebump.
"Dream Dress" could be better but it honestly has a strong plot compare to other stories. I still don't understand what lolita dresses were. But again, I'm not a fashion person and it wasn't the real theme of this story anyway. The ending of the story was insane and made me loved the story the best.
"The Laughing Tree" was an okay story and I think it would be better if it was stretch out and makes it a stand-alone novella instead of fast-forwarding to future. The opening was the best in my opinion because it showed how childish the boys were before they met a witch, which of course changed their life forever. I mainly want more depth on the apocalypse part of the story. It just fast-forwards years later too much. It is what ruins the pleasure of reading for me. The main character's fate was a tragedy, which probably saved the story somehow.
"Static: The Life and Works of Z" kept me interested because it has a different writing style. It was all from the interviews, letters, and recordings. It made me feel like I was watching a true story of mystery crime or something close to that. The ending was a bit weak, but it was later explained clearly in one of the short stories in"A Walking Shadow". If it wasn't for an explanation in "A Walking Shadow", this short story will have a lower rating.
"Shelob Headlines the Ox" is probably one of my favorite short stories in this novel. It haunted the depression of a trans and how she dealt with what was happening. The spider part was crazy and it does change the main character's personality. This story surprisingly has a happy for now ending when I thought there was no hope for her.
"Julie's Scars" was the weakest of the whole short stories in the collection. I didn't even enjoy how the story ended. It also was my first time to read it in script format and I think I will enjoy if it has a better ending. That was the only negative outcome of this story. I still am unclear on who was the Unholy Ghost.
Every story has something to do with spiders, which make it creepier. Highly recommended!
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