Fifteen eyes. Fifteen doorways to the tortured souls that previously wore those eyes. Eyes that held and wrestled with every imaginable human emotion throughout their lives and during their horrific, tormented deaths.
I love how Tyler Downs states that he had no idea of the basis for his story collection until he saw James Hutton’s cover art. Those juicy eyeballs glistened with inspiration, which filled Tyler’s head with “… eyeball-inspired visions” that became Solomon’s fifteen stories.
You may be asking, who is Solomon? Well, Solomon Northcutt is a Case File Assessor, but these are no ordinary files, at least, not in the way they are stored. This is no ordinary data storage system. There are no punch cards, magnetic tapes, hard drives, floppy disks, CDs, or USBs. There is simply just eyes; eyes in their neat little storage units, plopped into a jar like reluctant, slimy tadpoles.
Solomon extracts or, more accurately, views the data—the soul—from these eyeballs and writes a story based on each to present to his boss. So, from just seeing that eyeball cover, Tyler gives us a tremendous story collection throughline; the central, bloody thread that binds each story together.
It would be too easy for me to inadvertently inject a spoiler into this review as, after all, these are short stories. Therefore, I’m not going to describe them. That’s something for you, unsuspecting reader, to delve into yourselves; to sink into the myriad depths of Tyler’s mind and leave the world behind, if just for one, mind-blowing moment.
As a debut, Tyler’s collection of stories is a masterclass in literary entertainment worthy of high praise indeed. There were some issues, and Tyler openly admits he self-edited this collection, so that is the only area that faltered slightly for me. That said, with writing this good, it was easy to overlook them.
I especially loved the first story, ‘Method,’ and the intermission where we slide out of the eyeball’s focus and switch back to Solomon [“Bless you”].
‘Eye’ly recommended.