Nightshifters (Workplace Violence Occult Horror)

 

Nightshifters is a tale about night shift workers; Pete works for a massive company named Supalux, which produces lights, commercial, street lighting, shop signs, you name it, and they put it up in lights. It’s not his favorite thing in the world, but it pays the bills. When he’s asked to run the night shift, as a big order is coming in, and in hopes of a potential managerial role in the future, he says yes. He really, really wishes he never did as soon as his first check up round happens, where he finds the most gruesome decapitation accident of all time. From there things get worse. Not is all as it seems in Supalux. I often find in shorter stories or novellas like this, they leave the bad guy as a mysterious figure, or something half-explained, I think just out of sheer time saving, though it makes the reader want more. It’s fairly rare to get a book this short that gives a full explanation and reveals the whole tale behind what goes on. There are very many deaths throughout, and each one kind of feels a little like a Groundhog Day scenario. Whilst each death is as gruesome as the last, and all different, these terrifying masked figures, cloaked and silent, appear, do the deed, and disappear.

 

“He was screaming then, as the rotating blade crept upward, chipping away at his mandible, blood pouring from the savage wound that slowly split his face in two. Teeth were torn from their place in the gum, cast aside by the centrifugal force of the blade. Blood splattered, painting an even stripe of the back fence of the machine, and then further on up the wall behind. His tongue was bisected, the two halves flapping around as the blade continued up, into his soft palate”

 

I wondered if this reoccurring similarity of the way these characters turned up would become repetitive, but actually I ended up really liking the ominous vibe. It was almost otherworldly, and kind of freaky. The gore is nothing too crazy but the scenes that happen throughout have a wincing impact, mostly due to the fact that they involved factory machinery. I think it’s almost that kind of Final Destination feel, where there wouldn’t necessarily need to be bad guys for these horrid ends to occur; they could literally be accidental. Some involving massive saws, sheets of extremely thin metal. I mean there was the very deliberate and not to be taken accidentally, soldering iron in the eye, so perhaps not all can be seen that way. But all as equally cringe worthy and eye scrunchingly brutal. Whilst the majority of Nightshifters is this back and forth, from following Pete and his increasing anxiety of what odd things, such as fire exits being locked, and finding a staff member with his head cut off, and, cutting to chapters with staff members points of view and back stories and subsequently their grisly end, this makes for a page-turner right up until the very end, when Pete finds out the horrid truth as to what Supalux is all about. The ending was extremely well-explained and I loved the backstory; why suspicion follows the Supalux factories, and why the people behind the deaths on this night shift happen. There is also an epilogue which goes into the aftermath. Nightshifters is a quick and brilliantly written read, full of gory and fast paced deaths. If you enjoy reading tales of workplaces and that feeling of being somewhere you shouldn’t, this is the grisly tale for you.

 

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Written by Arianne, Sovereign Deity of the Damned

Nightshifters (2023)
Harrison Phillips
Independent
Cover Art: Insanecamel
5 / 5