“Slights” by Kaaron Warren

Slights: A Truly Frightening Read

If you’re looking for a smart, scary, and disturbing read, this is definitely the one for you.  Slights by Kaaron Warren is a deeply uneasy book to read, but once you start, you won’t be able to put it down. The writing is so powerful that I often felt as if I was an intruder in the mind of serial killer Stephanie (Stevie). That’s what made it so freaking terrifying. Usually I’m not scared when reading books in the horror genre, but Slights was able to tap into my fear of aloneness, and gave me nightmares.

There are events that we experience in our life that guide us to do the things that we do. Sometimes something so horrific happens, that can create a darkness in us. When Stevie accidentally kills her mother in a car accident and almost dies of her injuries, she finds herself in a dark room (the room of her afterlife). There is no one in this dark room who loves her, there are only strangers. Stevie recovers from her injuries, but after visiting her dark room, she realizes that she is hated by everyone in her life. She is alone and neglected from society. In the years preceding the accident, she can only recognize anger in others. When she tries to seek comfort by planting night-blooming jasmine in her back yard, she instead digs up lost items that reveals buried memories from her childhood. Digging up the past helps her to understand why she is the way she is, but it also aids in her obsession with death. Stevie kills others, and attempts suicide over and over in order to return to the dark room. She is a girl who would rather be ripped apart her afterlife by people who she has slighted, rather than feel alone when she is living. At least in her afterlife, she is the center of attention.

This really is one sick book. Sick being slang for “totally awesome”, of course. Honestly there wasn’t anything I didn’t like about Slights. It’s a story juiced up with creepy pornographic imagery, intense raw emotion, and over the top brutal and gory moments. The graphic scenes of Stevie attempting suicide is horrific and upsetting, but it’s the graphicness of it that kept me turning the page. And when I wasn’t reading the book, I was thinking about it.

The cast of characters isn’t large, but that’s because we’re supposed to focus on Stevie – a “junkie” addicted to her darkness. It’s hard not to be absorbed into the story as her obsession with death and madness intensifies. She’s a completely bonkers and cruel character, but I still couldn’t help but feel for her, and hope that everything was going to turn out good for her in the end.

Kaaron Warren writes with such extreme description, some of it so discomfiting, that you may at times  feel your stomach churn. But you will still want to read every single word. Slights is truly frightening, and therefore highly recommended.

I look forward to reading more from Kaaron Warren, and I’m ready to bite into the next book published by Angry Robot.

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