From the Horse’s Mouth (From the Horse’s Mouth Collection, #1)

A reassuring story for office workers everywhere

“Witty, wild and relentlessly noir.”

“Elegant but brutal.”

“Almost every character is sickeningly hateful, cowardly and ultra-manipulative.”

Imagine another person controlling everything you do. Imagine wasting away in a job you hate with no chance of promotion. Imagine feeling like no one in the world respects you. Now imagine you could change all that in an instant, but it meant risk. Would you have the guts to do it? Gottfried Baumauer, Ridley Obelmäker and Dimitri Pissec are three men in exactly that position – stuck in a dead-end job they secretly loathe, but need. When sexy new recruit, Caitlyn Brichacek, arrives their working world is tipped slowly upside-down. Bravery, lies and decency are the first threads that begin to unravel. After that, it’s anyone’s game.

Have you met him? Maxwell D. Kalist is his name. Medium height, medium build. Walks slowly with a tricky gait using an off-white cane made from three gorilla femur bones fused end-to-end. The lower bone is dirty because of contact with the ground; the upper is rounded and slicked regularly by the motion of his molesting, oily palm. Kalist walks this way and employs the cane because he suffers from a slight difference in leg length. Greyish teeth protrude over his thin, lower lip, but they’re not unclean. His upper lip has a delicate cleft to it, as does his palate. He only wears socks occasionally, but he always wears mauve – a dark mauve with a sense of kidney to it.

Author Krueger clearly hates certain office environments and what they can do to people. She takes our deepest, darkest fears and disgusts and translates them into an unbearable, darkly comic pseudo-reality. Not for the faint-hearted; it’s punishingly nasty – verging on the grotesque at times – but it’ll make you split your sides laughing.

“Anyone in a job they hate should read From The Horse’s Mouth, but beware: it’s so sharp and devious it’ll leave you desperate to hand your notice in and get the fuck out of there.”

From The Horse’s Mouth #1 is the first in a series of loosely related short stories with interconnecting themes and secrets. All the wrong people are in power, there is widespread corruption and deceit and the least expected outcomes happen, often at the hands of the least expected people. Best described as modern Poe meets Orwell’s *1984* with more than a tinge of *American Psycho*, this is one short story you’ll never forget, even if you want to.