Eat Me

Description

You wake up at a tea party with no idea how you got the invitation. The cups are real, the cake is real, the little tag tied to the slice says EAT ME — and the man pouring the tea promises the trip out is gentler than the trip you took to get here.

Victims surface days after they vanish, dosed to the eyes, arranged at long tables set for a storybook that curdled — mismatched chairs, a teapot still warm, a tag in looping script on every plate. Toxicologist Imogen Pryce identifies a cocktail of hallucinogens so precise it had to be tailored, designed not just to kill but to send the dying somewhere bright and wrong on the way out. The scenes are whimsical. That’s the obscenity of them.

The killer is a host, not a brute. He wants his guests delighted before he wants them gone. And he’s escalating — bigger tables, more chairs, a guest list that’s started to include people Imogen has interviewed, as if he’s reading her case over her shoulder and setting a place for everyone who gets close. There’s a chair at the head of the newest table with a name card she recognizes. She pours herself a drink she shouldn’t and decides to RSVP.

Surreal, woozy horror-comedy that drugs the reader along with the cast, this one makes the descent feel like a party you can’t quite refuse. Sweet, bright, and absolutely poisoned.

Pull up a chair. The tag says eat me, and it’s rude to keep the host waiting.