Cassandra Khaw has a painterly quality to their prose, an ability to brush in layers of detail so compelling and bright with meaning that you’ll keep reading even if you’re not yet sure where the complete picture is taking you. It’s a very good quality to have for horror writing, and it’s especially beneficial, and thrilling for the reader, when it lands in a book like Find Me Where It Ends.
Like Khaw’s breakthrough book, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, this tale of a woman and the unexpected specter of Death following her through life is brief, its prose and its narrative sharpened to a fine point capable of moving through your brain with grace and sharp clarity that cuts deep. It’s one of Khaw’s finest stories, and one of the most emotionally raw and honest horror books you’re likely to pick up this year.
The women in Antigone’s family have an interesting way of knowing when their life is nearly at an end. For generations now, each of these women has learned their demise is close through the arrival of a spectral black dog, a dark companion that will shadow them until it’s time for them to go. Antigone’s seen it happen before, so she’s not entirely surprised when, one random morning, her own furry, doglike Death shows up at her door.
She’s not surprised, perhaps, but she is distressed. At just 40 years old, Antigone was certain she had more time, but with nothing to really be done about it, she attempts to carry on with her days. She reads the newspaper every morning. She works as the occasional supernatural investigator for her friend Vera, and in contemplating what appears to be her impending death, she makes an unlikely friend of her Death dog, who becomes as much a pet as a companion.
But Death comes for us all, and no matter how comfortable she gets with her circumstance, Vera can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong.
Khaw structures the book as a series of major developments on the road to an event that might prove to be Antigone’s Death or might be something else entirely, laying out initial emotional arcs that are clear, straightforward, and easy to hold onto as things get bumpier and slipperier. Reading the initial chapters of this novella-length story, it’s easy to read it as a woman adjusting to her own mortality as middle age approaches, coming to understand that if she’s going to get through life (however long it might be), she’s going to have to make peace with her Death. She might even need to make a friend of it.
But this is a horror story, not a simple story of reckoning with a passage we all must eventually face. The moment Antigone starts to adjust to her new world, one in which her literal Death sits beside her on the couch and eats treats from her hand, things swerve. Ghostly encounters, bad memories, and Antigone’s own restlessness start to eat away at what had been a comfortable, if strange, arrangement. What does facing your Death every day, literally, do to a person? What does it stir that was long buried? These questions, and their answers, are existential horror in the truest sense, as Antigone contemplates not just her exit from the world, but how much control she might have over that departure.
It’s difficult to say more about the story without unspooling the entire 100-page narrative before you’ve had a chance to read it, so I’ll end here with a word about the prose. Khaw is, for my money, one of the two or three best stylists in genre fiction, a writer with a tremendous knack for elegant, gorgeous sentences. Their words leave you constantly pausing to reread them, not because you don’t understand but because you want to savor what your brain just absorbed.
That Khaw also has a knack for deeply affecting stories that are also single-sitting reads feels like a bonus, but taken together they achieve something else entirely. You can get lost in a 100-page Cassandra Khaw story. You can sink into it, swim around, let its themes and emotional gut punches shift and change you. It’s a kind of magic, and with this dark tale of a confrontation with Death, Khaw proves they still cast a spell few others in the horror world can equal.
Find Me Where It Ends is available now wherever you get your books.
