Grey Skies by William Becker

Publisher: Self-published, June 2019 (pre-order)

ASIN: B07PHGQB8M

Available: Kindle edition

Grey Skies by William Becker is the author’s second novel. The main character’s first-person voice narrates the story, but his identity, the story’s location, time, and plot are revealed piecemeal over many chapters.

The narrator suffers through an excruciating series of horrific ordeals. He and the reader know that some parts are unreal. The question is, which parts are dreams or delusions, and which are real?

The narrator finds and buries a nun’s slashed, bloody body; wriggling balls of black spiders cling to doors and walls in his home; he’s trapped in a cramped sub-basement, and crawls and scrapes his way through a stinking underground tunnel to escape; he wades waist-deep through brown, feces-laden sewer water; a giant spider with a human head chases him through a burning house; a stuffed, sackcloth giant stalks him through a doomed cruise ship, listing and powerless in a monstrous storm; he’s drowning in black ocean waters; he finds himself under giant tree roots next to the nun’s rotting corpse.

Throughout these miseries there are mysteries. Who is our narrator? Does he have a family? Why is he being tortured? Who is torturing him? Readers will appreciate the author’s ingenuity in piling on gruesome events and tying them into the mysteries.

The author scattered several paragraphs of nonsense letter, numbers and symbols throughout the novel. These lines of literary graffiti detract from the story. He also appended two unrelated short stories. Recommended.

Contains: Gore and violence.

Reviewed by Robert D. Yee