Here's a little gem of a novella that I don't want to think too much about because I know I'll find an abundance of holes. It unfolds relatively consistently according to the 'Twilight Zone' template, an impeccable opening line teasing us into a simple but highly effective nightmare scenario that hits out of nowhere and builds slowly and inexorably, with further elements and background added on a chapter by chapter basis, until the final twist.

Like anything in the 'Twilight Zone', it can be read straight, if we accept all the supernatural leaps that the approach requires, and we do, at least for a long while. However, it also gradually fosters an abiding sense of doubt as to whether that's the right way to read this. Perhaps our sympathies are a little premature and the good guy is really the bad guy and everything supernatural is truly psychological. And, best of all, once we start to have those doubts, we realise just how universal a horror this book touches on. Which one? Kids.

Phil Pendleton is a lucky man. He's doing well at work and they're considering him for promotion. He has a beautiful girlfriend in Lori who does all the things he likes in bed. In fact, he's just had an imaginative night with her and now she just wants to chill on the couch all day with him, which he's all for. He just has to pop down to the local store for chocolate because she has a craving. And that is where he sees the boy. Well, he hears him first, because he lets out a powerful scream from not far away, just a little further down the candy aisle.

He's a strange boy, not because he's maybe six or seven and towheaded, but because he's dressed in an old fashioned style, as if he was Amish. He also looks healthy, unlike his mum, who looks like she used to be pretty but has totally fallen to seed and no longer pays any attention to her health or appearance. And, of course, he knows exactly how to scream, like any little kid who thinks they can get their way just by annoying the crap out of everyone else in the vicinity, so prompting them to cast evil glances at mum, who will wilt under the pressure and given in to their demands.

It's worth mentioning here that Phil doesn't have any kids. In fact, that's the reason that he's not with his ex-wife any more. He and Stacey agreed from the outset that they wouldn't have any, but her biological clock kept ticking until she needed one and so the issue eventually split them apart. So Phil's with Lori now, the subject hasn't come up yet and he couldn't be happier. So he feels sorry for this kid's mum and wants the hell out of the store as soon as possible. And it's as he drives away to take his haul of chocolate back to Lori that his world changes.

Initially, it's because the car behind crashes into him at speed at a stop light, which is traumatic in itself, but then it's because that car is being driven by the long suffering mother from the store, a woman who survives the crash only to walk out into passing traffic and be killed by a taxi. And then it's the fact that, when the cops get him home, the screaming kid is there to welcome him. Why? "I live here, daddy," he says, with all the sweet innocence that the right kid can bring to bear.

Phil pleads his case, of course, but he gets nowhere with the cops because somehow he's wandered into the 'Twilight Zone" and wandering back out isn't going to be that simple. Not only was the kid inside to let the cops in, they checked the records and he's clearly Adam Pendleton, an orphan who Phil and Stacey adopted. They called her and Phil's mum and they backed up the records. There are even photos all over the house of Phil and Adam on a succession of holidays. Suddenly, Phil is a dad and there's nothing he can do about it.

I'll stop there, because of course there are things he can try to do about it and he does. There are further revelations that may not explain but certainly hint at what's going on. One major clue is a strange abundance of sour candy, the only food that young Adam eats and now the only food that Phil eats, always the same brand too: Gjøk. This is what leads us to that killer opening line: "Four months to the day he first encountered the boy at Walmart, the last of Phil Pendleton's teeth fell out." A diet of nothing but sour candy is unsurprisingly not good on the teeth or indeed on the rest of Phil's health. A further clue is found in what may be visions, which is where the cover art comes in to play. But who knows.

I'm not going to tell you what Gjøk translates to because I didn't know until Burke told me, even if my sister would get it immediately because she's studying Norwegian. However, as far as I know, she hasn't read Seanan McGuire's 'InCryptid' novels, so wouldn't make the connection between a Norwegian word and the only cryptid that the Price-Healy family tends to kill on sight, because of its inherent danger to every other cryptid. Now, 'Sour Candy' dates to 2007, so Burke's Gjøk clearly aren't a riff on McGuire's Johrlac. Maybe the reverse applies, but I would guess that this is a wild example of two authors taking the same inspiration from the same source and extrapolating it in different directions only to end up occasionally in exactly the same place.

Most of the stories about evil children I've read involve some sort of change, a good kid somehow being possessed or shifted or duplicated into a bad kid. Sometimes they're just bad kids who know how to play innocent, the 'Bad Seed' model. I don't remember another horror story about a child being acquired, against the parents' will, and that makes this not just original but acutely brutal. Add in the fact that Phil never wanted kids and not only suddenly has one but also doesn't have a girlfriend because of it and you can imagine the trauma. Many would see that as a scarier turn of fate than Michael Myers standing outside the window with a kitchen knife in his hand.

I'd suggest that the only negative aspects to this are how relentlessly it moves forward and how it wraps up pretty quickly, in seventy pages and change, but neither is really a negative. This isn't a story that needs to be complicated by time and perspective shifts. The fact that it's so inexorable in its unfolding is part of why it's so brutal to Phil and, by extension, to us if we imagine how much our own comfortable lives would be turned upside down if this happened to us. And, while I'd have liked more explanation, it probably works better without it, leaving us to determine whether this should be read straight or as a psychological trauma.

Either way, it should be read. No wonder it's one of the most frequently recommended titles over at the Books of Horror Facebook group. It's short, it's thoroughly effective and it only gets more horrific the more we think about it. Even if we start to see holes. That doesn't diminish its power. ~~ Hal C F Astell