Review: He Knows When You've Been Sleeping
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 6, 2014
Really effective horror fiction plays upon our real fears... not the fear of running into a guy with a chainsaw but some of the primal basic fears we all have. In his novelette "A Sincere Warning about the Entity in Your Home," Jason Arnopp takes one such fear and combines it with a highly effective framing device and a gruesome climax, and the result is a genuinely chilling tale.Entity purports to be a manuscript from the former owner of a house to its current owners giving them the bad news that the house is possessed by a vengeful spirit and that they are likely now doomed. The narrator goes on to describe what happened when he and his partner moved in and strange things started happening. The first symptom was that they both experienced difficulty sleeping, but, as time went on, they discovered that the reason for their sleep problems was a spirit that visited them when they slept and played often sadistic games with their ability to breathe.The fear of suffocating in one's sleep is very common and probably affects everyone at one time or another. Arnopp plays on this fear and makes it real... for the narrator and for the readers as well. This is a ghost story in the traditional sense of the word, but it's a ghost that's primarily focused on one thing only, people's ability to breathe, and a ghost that only visits, and wreaks havoc, when they sleep.  The results are likely to be quite unsettling for some readers.Arnopp employs a number of clever devices to ramp up the suspense as the book goes along. Readers know from the beginning that the narrator somehow does survive and presumably rid himself of the ghost, but just how that happens is a mystery for most of the book, one that will keep readers intrigued. Further, Arnott throws a number of obstacles in the narrator's way. It seems the ghost isn't restricted to the original house but can follow the narrator and strike anywhere, and the more the narrator tries to rids himself of the ghost, the angrier the ghost becomes. And, unlike many stories of this type, the eventual revelation of the narrator's salvation isn't a copout; it's an exceptionally ghoulish touch that provides a near perfect climax."Entity" is as a highly effective and imaginative a piece of short horror fiction as you're likely to find on Amazon. It even boasts a great marketing gimmick that allows the publisher to mail the manuscript in the form of a personalized letter from the narrator (a great Halloween present). My only caveat is the asking price of $1.49 for a 40-page novelette, which some may feel excessive (I got the book for free as a promotion). Although some may object to paying this much on general principles (and I'm always leery of doing so), I felt the overall excellence of the story and Arnopp's remarkable imagination displayed warrant a high grade. I'm giving this 4 1/2 stars rounded up to 5 based on the story's general overall quality. Pleasant dreams...