An Appetite Without A Self

He didn't call it despair. He called it arithmetic.

Eli Brandt has done the sum many times, in the careful, patient way of a man who no longer expects to be argued out of it, and every time it comes out the same. The people he loves are heavier for him. They would be lighter without him. The correct and merciful thing, the only thing the arithmetic allows, is to subtract himself from the lives he is certain he is spoiling. He does not call this despair. He calls it accuracy.

So he comes to a small, clean room with a fluorescent tube overhead and the blinds half-drawn on a gray afternoon, the kind of room built so that a person can say, out loud, to someone who will not look away, the worst true thing he knows about himself. And in a voice gone very even, the voice of a man who has stopped arguing and is only reporting the verdict, he says it.

But the room holds more than the careful woman with the pad on her knee. Something has come to the sound of his confession, with a cold and total attention that owes him nothing. It begins to weigh him, to take his measure, to move through the rooms of his life looking for the thing it has come to find. And as it works, patient and unhurried and entirely without warmth, it arrives at conclusions about a suffering human being that the man himself will never hear.

An Appetite Without a Self is quiet horror at its coldest and most cerebral: a slow, restrained, deeply interior novella about confession, self-erasure, and the terror of being seen and measured by something that gives you nothing back. No gore, no spectacle, only the patient accumulation of dread inside a bright clean room, the calm of a mind reasoning where a mind should recoil, and the oldest cold question a person can be made to answer. It is a self-contained story in What You Already Wanted, a collection of standalone quiet psychological horror novellas for readers who love the philosophical dread of Thomas Ligotti, the ordinary menace of Shirley Jackson, and the cold interiority of Iain Reid and Catriona Ward.

Read it under the brightest light you have. The dark was never the frightening part.