No Sh!t, There I Was: The Devil’s Apprentice

Everyone likes Satan and dinosaurs, right?

Today from the No Shit ToC, I bring to you: The Devil’s Apprentice by Premee Mohamed.

This is another of those stories that crawled into my brain and left me feeling incredibly fucked up. It refused to let me go, and I had to put it in the ToC because, as a caring person, I need to share that sensation.

The Devil’s Apprentice is about a young man who becomes the Devil’s apprentice because how the hell else are you going to get a job in the current economy? And The Omen-style, he gets a familiar. Only very unlike The Omen, he doesn’t get a rottweiler: he gets a brightly-colored, tiny, carnivorous dinosaur. A tiny, carnivorous dinosaur who would like to eat him. Because the Devil is a giant asshole.

Premee’s writing is left me feeling so disoriented as I read this story; the description of Hell as something banally horrifying and incredibly surreal. Nothing works quite the way you expect it to. Nothing looks quite the way it should. It’s incredibly desolate and empty and too full and almost claustrophobic at the same time. Nothing in this story went as I expected it to, and it left an impression on me that I could not shake for weeks.

This story is strange and red with blood, not quite the opposite of yesterday’s story, but on another axis entirely. I can’t wait to share this one with you, so you should support the Kickstarter and make that happen! We’re in the home stretch, just $1300 left!