REVIEW: Family Business (book) by Jonathan Sims

Family Business is horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Angie was Diya's best and closest childhood friend. As adults, they started sharing an apartment together after Angie went through some difficult times. When Angie suddenly dies, Diya can barely keep functioning. It feels like the whole world expects her to go right back to normal, but Diya can't bring herself to go to work like usual and can hardly stand to keep up with the other people in her life.

If she wants to keep her and Angie's apartment, however, she's either going to have to take on a new roommate (not happening) or start working again. When one of the people working for the small cleaning business, Slough & Sons, that came to clean Angie's blood from the floor suddenly calls to offer her a job, she accepts, even though she's never done work like this before. Considering Angie, she initially worries that cleaning up after the recently deceased might hit her too hard. There are, understandably, aspects she could do without, but in general the physicality of the work appeals to her. It also helps that she gets along well with Xen, one of her new coworkers.

Diya begins to worry as she starts having odd "episodes" at some of Slough & Sons' jobs. Everything is normal, and then suddenly she finds herself overwhelmed with what seems to be the final thoughts and feelings of the deceased people she's cleaning up after. It's deeply disturbing, and it seems to be getting worse. Is there something wrong with her, or is there something more sinister going on?

The horror aspects of this took a while to get going, but it all eventually built up to something I found genuinely creepy and awful. The bulk of the book is focused on Slough & Sons' cleaning work and Diya's fragile emotional state. It takes a while for readers to learn exactly what happened to Angie, but the bigger mystery is what happened to George, Frank Slough's son and the person who was supposed to take over the business after Frank. Diya knows that he died but not much else - no one in the Slough family seems inclined to talk about him. 

Once the revelations started, it was a hard and fast ride with a few very gory moments. I was both afraid to see what would happen to certain characters and compelled to keep reading.

I didn't learn until later that Sims had a horror anthology podcast, The Magnus Archives. I've since made it my work-time listening.