Institutional Memory

By: Gary Frank

Narrated by: Jon Mitchell

Standing five stories tall in a relatively small city, the Howard Phillips building is like any other building: It is secretly inhabited by an entity from another plane of existence that feeds off the energy of the people who work within its walls. Unfortunately, the life-form inhabiting this particular building has been infected by a sort of virus of hate; as companies move out and its inhabitants dwindle, this alien intelligence has chosen to use fear as a means of obtaining sustenance. It is up to Jon, Marcy, and Bettie to stop this haunting presence before it’s too late.

©2008 Gary Frank (P)2021 David N. Wilson

An Office 'I Don't Know Where She Went' Horror

A pleasant surprise with a very modern office horror tale and a wonderfully odd premise. The stealthy nature of the horror and unassuming way it preys on victims is scary but off enough to slyly question modern work dynamics. It’s a book for everyone who ever felt inexplicably watched at work. The approach is atmospheric building on weird but just normal enough glitches and buzzes of the buildings around us into something much more ominous. The way the villain attacks here feels creative and easy to visualize. The pacing is well handled and left me curious to see what would happen next even when there were stretches of character and romance subplots, which played well into an office squad against the horror. Eventually things feel more like a puzzle of how these characters will advance, if they can. There is a mental health subplot about self harm (never too gross) that is the sort of thing (stigmatizing/exploiting mental health) that nags at me but in the end I think it added to the character nuance and themes. My read on these themes was that in part it reflects the gradients of subtle power dynamics from predatory exploitative bosses and harassment minded coworkers to more earnest attempts to earn a way to survive or find a place in the world through work; an extreme of how this ego sucking dynamic crushes and disconnects us all in different ways (but enough of me ranting about my interpretation). Overall I enjoyed the modern approach to horror and found it’s premise unique, the characters were well established and that helped with the hear of things. The narrator reads in a somewhat flat way but I found it worked well, he has a casual vibe which lends itself well to the material and changes his pacing well to emphasize more tense moments in an effective way. Good stuff.