A traditional horror story that seems familiar even though it is new.
Short Horror Story Review Neil Gaiman Feeders And Eaters 2006 Harper Collins
Spoiler Alerts
A fairly traditional and unsurprising twist in the tale slice of the macabre, with hints of Roald Dahl’s The Man From The South.
By sheer chance, a man, the narrator of the story, meets an old friend he hasn’t seen for many years, a once tall, handsome man who found it easy to gain a woman’s affection.
His friend is now an emaciated wrecked, aged, and haggard and looking decidedly unwell and unhappy.
The men share a drink in a café and the old friend relates his dreadful experiences. He has met with an old woman who seems to be some kind of vampiric cannibal. She is wasting away in her flat (next to his own), and only seems to come back from close to death when he replies to her request for raw meat, before eating half her cat alive, and then starting on the friend himself.
The narrator is shocked to see his friend has lots of missing flesh, and that he seems quite a willing accomplice in his own slow devourment. He briefly sees the now youthful looking woman when she meets them at the café.
We don’t really get enough of a sense of why neither man simply reports this grizzly woman to the police, and why she has such a succubus hold over the doomed old friend.
A modern grand guignal that reads like an old Tales From The Crypt piece, and as if someone ought to have told it many times before.
