The Nightcrawler, Still Extant #1, is an explosion. The story starts with a literal bang and it echoes all the way to the end. Simply brilliant.

At its core, this story is about human resilience at the face of great adversity. That when you have lost everything, the world, the normalcy and safety – how will you survive? Will you have the mental strength to keep going? And that at times even though one may feel like they can never trust another human, no matter how close, the truth is, one simply has to keep moving until they find the person or people they can rely on to provide, and in turn, offer one’s own unique set of skills. It’s also about prejudices – the perception of certain people we may have based on their look or profession or their role in our lives. In the end, these superficial characteristics do not a human make. It’s something much deeper. And everyone has secrets that no one else knows.

I love how Sheppard kept the factor of terror zinging throughout the whole book. The moments of hope and elation of survival were delivered hand in hand with grim realizations and surprise twists. The danger that emerges at night is enough to raise the hairs and goosbumps, and as is expected, the humans, even after the world as we know it has collaped, will still remain humans, if not worse.

The Nightcrawler is a banger. It reads quick at only 146 ebook pages and you will be thoroughly entertained. If you do decide to jump in, brace yourself, it’s going to be a wild ride! I’m not going to mention the trigger or content warnings, because it’s horror. You can expect the nastiest of stuff. There is only one thing that can make my stomach turn in horror… and Sheppard included it in this story. When I realized that, I may have muttered: “Oh, you nasty bastard!” and that wasn’t towards the character, that was towards Sheppard. Haha! I had to take a few deep breaths to ‘get over it’… Anyway. It was a logical inclusion given the situation.

In the end, the story left me with a good feeling. There was the occasional banter, the rare moment of laugh out loud, the moment of human kindness when it matters the most. You could say, Sheppard has used humanity’s worst and the best to weave a tale of scariest monsters.

It also did not go unnoticed how each chapter accentuated inspiration from poems that have stood the test of time.