Author: Sergio Gomez
Publication Year: 2020
Chapters: 20
Rating: ***
In this little tale of holiday horrors, we take a step into a familiar set-up of strangers being brought together at a single place to take shelter from nature's wrath, only to discover someone or something lurking around is out to kill them.
The Visitor starts the pages at a diner during Christmas Eve where its owner Sal, regulars Kaito and Ichiko Takahasi, and traveling poet Moshe Janovsky have been keeping each other company as Indiana's worst snowstorm covers the road in inches of thick snow. They're soon joined by Xavier and his Collie, Norman, who just survived an accident that had their car crashing at a barricade, as well as truck driver Santiago Sanchez whose rig couldn't handle the now-slippery road. With hot food and drinks to go around, a generator keeping everyone warm and a football game playing on the TV, the group make the best out of their predicament by talking about mundane things and share a little bit about themselves. Until, that is, a lone tree branch outside snapped into falling unto a power pole and taking the lines with it, sending the diner into pitch darkness and shivering cold.
And it is around this time that the group would soon know that there is another visitor joining them. A hunter and its hound out to stalk and prey on a few specimens that just happen to be stranded inside a diner...
As slasher story, Sergio Gomez done an equitable enough job of keeping his novella a fun and breezy read by keeping the story easy to digest and with the right amount of popcorn entertainment as any good bodycount horror should be. It's basically your standard cat-and-mouse hunt, straight to the point towards its thrills and kills once the titular visitor starts to make their rounds on killing these innocent people, only the catch here is that our killer is an alien, down to the space suit and helmet, armed with a space rifle to go along its knife and even tagged along its own tamed creature which is supposed to be a hound of sorts. Even if this is far from anything new (Without Warning (1980), Predator (1987) and Almost Human (2013), for example), this is still an intriguing turn for anyone wanting more than just another average escaped loonie terrorizing people in their slasher stories, though I do wished the author gave us a little more detail as to the motive behind this thing's hunt as the story only went as far as telling us what it does with the bodies, but not what for.
The book did fairly with its character introductions and how it crafted their little predicament with the unfavorable weather, vividly describing the sheer coldness and unforgiving barrage of snowfall with brooding wordplay which adds to the intensity and atmosphere of the eventual attacks. Not much in terms of developing its casts seeing the length of the story, though Gomez did pen the kills and the ensuing carnage descriptive enough to vividly visualize the stalk and stab/shoot action and whatever gruesome gore and horrors that go with it, thus maintaining itself to be an engaging read on a good level.
Though, again, it doesn't offer anything new to the slasher subgenre, The Visitor is a fun read for anyone who wants a quick and easy horror short to indulge in, one that delivers cold chills and classic kills with a simple scifi aftertaste!
Bodycount: 6
Notable Kill: A gnarly laser shot to the head courtesy of a space rifle. Apart from that, we also got poor fella who got their head bitten off by a large critter!
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