The Boy with the Spider Face by AJ Franks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(in Italian in the first comment below)

At first, I would thank Crystal Lake Publishing for the opportunity to read an ARC of this novella.

A hard story that features a little boy whose face is half that of a monstrous spider.
A small, bigoted and hypocritical neighborhood in which he slowly approaches adolescence, a school where he is targeted by bullies, where parents are too distracted by their having to be good parents to be really good parents and where a new friend makes ignite a new heat that warms Jeff’s heart.
Jeff's life is changing at a speed that doesn't give him time to figure out how to behave and how to deal with it.

He is not the monster that everyone sees when the gaze rests on his aspect of him, he does not understand why the world does not see him for what he is and judge him without knowing anything.

Here, Stephen King had tried a little bit with Carrie to speak in a horror key of the same topics: bullying, self-acceptance, sexuality, relationship with parents, with friends, body transformations.

I really appreciated the style of writing, the story and its unfolding but maybe it was put into the cauldron a little too much all at once.
The brevity of the story leaves no room for a more in-depth and 360-degree investigation of the characters and events that follow one another, leaving instead a sense of anxiety and haste which nevertheless leads to a conclusion that I loved and that I found very original and well successful.

In short, monsters we are not born.

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