Hard Labor Delivers Something Truly Monstrous

3/30/2025 4:29 PM CST

Dear Reader,

I have another review for you today. I recently read a horror short that snuck up on me and left a lasting impression.

Before we get there though, I have to do the obligatory promises of blogs I have on the backburner even though they appear as if they will never happen. While we still have INLAND EMPIRE and Street Fighter to contend with as looming projects that haven't come to fruition, I also really want to take a moment to write out what my experience was like being a first-time self-published author. There is a huge learning curve and much confusion around how all of it is supposed to work, and I would love to share my recent experience in that realm.

But here is the thing. There are 4 more Killer Mike and the Blood Slugs stories to come this year. Each release requires far more work than I originally anticipated, but I am 100% committed to this plan. What that means for my larger blog projects is that I will simply have to get to them when I can get to them and when inspiration strikes. So, what you can expect moving forward is probably going to be reviews and shorter pieces about writing, reading, or whatever happens to be on my mind.

Thank you for reading, and without further ado:

Hard Labor Delivers Something Truly Monstrous

Book Review: Hard Labor - Jim Donohue

My Verdict: A great short with some brutal twists

 

It’s funny how you stumble on some stories. I had put out an open call for ARC readers, and a fellow by the name of Jim Donohue responded. Later, when he was checking in with me about something, he mentioned that he had also been writing recently and asked if I would like to read one of his shorts. I said, "Of course." He mentioned it was only 12 pages, and I’m a sucker for a quick read, so he didn’t have to use any advanced persuasion tactics.

The night that he sent it to me, I ended up giving it a look before bed. I often start a story as I lay down to sleep and end up dozing off a couple pages in. The fact that I fall asleep is not a condemnation of the stories themselves; I am just usually so exhausted that I can’t make it very far. No biggie, I just backtrack a few pages when I pick it up later; no harm, no foul. But Hard Labor was one of those stories that sucked me in right away.

This is a story concerning a nightmarish childbirth scenario, and the opening scenes depicting a panicked delivery room immediately reminded me of the stressful birth of my own child and all the emotions that went with that. Not to mention, I have a friend who recently went through a horrific birthing experience (don’t worry, everyone ended up being ok), so I was high-tuned to the scene.

The first third of this story starts out with the basic human fears and stresses during birth but slowly begins to pepper in some strange moments and uncanny reactions from the medical staff, creating a sense of suffocating paranoia that only builds from there.

When things start to go bad, they go really bad, and the strange paranoia gets ramped up into fully surreal and awful territory. There’s body horror. There’s identity horror. There’s mass murder. For this second third, things get really strange, and I found myself wondering what it could all mean. I knew the weird imagery was not there just for the sake of being weird, but the wild symbols and bloody action had me guessing up to the end.

When things resolve in the final third, that is where the true horror really comes to roost. Sure, up to this point, we have seen grotesqueries and splatter, but when it all comes into focus with an emotional gut punch, that is when the horror suddenly went from surreal and cartoonish to bleakly grounded. By the time the story was over, I was haunted because what started as a gory roller coaster ride ended with real-life pain and horrors.

If you like a quick read, stories that take you for a ride, and stories that take relatable horrors and twist them to funhouse mirror proportions, then this is for you. I quite enjoyed it and will be thinking about it for some time. I would tell you to go pick it up now, but it is no longer available. But fear not, you will get your chance to read this when it appears in an upcoming anthology release from Graveside Press. Be on the lookout for that and other work that Donohue has up his sleeve.

My only disclaimer is this: I see talk online about how twist endings are cheap and indicative of bad writing, so if you are in that camp, this probably is not the story for you. Donohue employs a number of tactics in this short story, and the most important is the twist at the end. I personally think that a good twist recontextualizes the rest of the story and brings more cohesion to everything overall, and that is what Donohue has done here in Hard Labor. I have been as vague as possible about the details of the story because there is one shocking turn of events after the other, and I don’t want to spoil it for you, especially that gut punch of an ending.