Outer Realm Publishing, $0.99, ISBN 978-1005721930
Horror, 2019

Note to the publisher and the author: it may be more reassuring in terms of first impression if the file name for this thing hadn’t been “first draft template”. Just saying. Is it so hard to rename the file “most awesome poo ever”?

Fortunately, The Relic itself isn’t a first draft tier story. Our protagonist Stanley’s life takes the turn for the worse when his regular visit to a wealthy client’s place—he’s their usual exterminator looking for termites and such—and witnesses how unusual, to say the least, the folks in that place have become. He flees after seeing a ghastly rat mutilate and devour itself, but not before pocketing a small statue of a demon-like entity.

As one can predict, poor Stan starts having weird dreams and episodes in which he would black out and come to feeling half-dead and, worse, having mutilated his own body so badly that it’s a wonder that he hadn’t died. He guesses that the statue has something to do with it, but yikes, it doesn’t want to leave Stan.

The resolution of the story has me feeling tad divided, though. On one hand, I admire how Stan manages to take a really, really, really bad situation and turn it into something more to his advantage, but I also feel that this resolution is too neat to the point of making the story feel contrived.

In other words, the first half or so is a high tier Amicus Productions affair, while the remaining parts feel more like a middling Tales from the Crypt episode.

All in all, while on the uneven side, this one’s alright for a quick and breezy as well as cheap (that’s important to me) read into the dark side. Three oogies would be just about the right score for it.

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