H/armed

By: Dustin LaValley

Narrated by: Adam Kurylo

Length: 2 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

H/armed follows a man known as Estes who must try and bring logic and reason to 39 others who find themselves at the bidding of a bloodthirsty director inside a department store. This man, who is heard and never seen, warns of deadly consequences should these 40 individuals not abide by his instructions for those paying to view the livestream via the darknet: If you try and escape, you die. If you do not fight, you are killed by the security team. The last to survive earns the right to leave alive.

This darkly comedic, thrilling horror satire addresses the societal norm of control through obedience. It's a story that uses ultraviolence to express ideas and address stereotypes portrayed by Hollywood and accepted by the general masses, including the state of race, gender, sexual identity, and the power of individualism against bigotry. The voices of a few cannot control the actions of the many.

©2021 D&T Publishing LLC (P)2022 D&T Publishing LLC

Kill them all

No explanation required violence. Kill or be killed. The setting is a department store full of hunting equipment, cooking cutlery, a pharmacy, and anything you may need to make someone’s next breath their last. The teams are armed and ready with the only rule being that no one can leave until everyone else is dead. Forty people enter, one survives. If anyone tries to escape, they are shot. All live streamed on the dark web for viewers to place their bets.
Once this gets rolling it is nonstop violence. Trust no one and don’t ever let your guard down. Do you have what it takes to survive?
Short and bloody leaving you with question that don’t need to be answered in order to enjoy.
The narrator almost had me stop this one. Very robotic speech. If it wasn’t so short, I would have not been able to finish.

Uncompromising ultraviolence with searing insight

40 contestants take part in a deadly game, live-streamed on the dark web, under the apparent control of the sinister-sounding Director. In this brutal Big Brother scenario, where participants are eliminated with lethal weapons rather than votes, the ultimate (and unlikely) prize is survival. LaValley’s unsentimental yet evocative prose style riffs on themes of individual self-determination versus mass control, the unthinking obedience of the majority versus the resistance of the few, and satirises a bleak world in which character is necessarily reduced to stereotype; allegiances are cold and strategic rather than deeply felt. Clanging with motors, brands, tattoos, heavy metal and deadly weaponry, this novella takes us into video-game-style terror but the shock-and-awe violence reaches beyond that of the mere gratuitous, instead holding up a mirror to an ugly society, depicted by LaValley in staccato, almost Kerouac-style, rhythms neatly captured by narrator Adam Kurylo, who tells the tale with a precise low-key menace. Cosy it ain’t. Thought-provoking it is.