Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Human Resources is an anthology of horror stories by Kent J. Starrett, released on October 30th, 2018. It is a collection of Surreal Horror and Body Horror Science Fiction and Fantasy, most based around the general theme of what it means to be human. One of the stories, "Immunity", has been adapted for narration on
YouTube.
This book provides examples of:
- Ambiguous Time Period: Unless set in the far future, most of the stories don't specify when they occur. The car owned by the Gray Family in "The Backwater Roads" doesn't have air conditioning, Tricia in "The Secret Game" has a bunny-ears television set, and Anton in "Les Amoureux" doesn't own a television and relies on public transport in the suburbs. Only "The Order of Creeping Things" and "School Day" are set in a specific era, the former told through dated journal entries in the year 1997, and the latter taking place 20 Minutes into the Future.
- An Aesop: "Sweet Tooth" and "Vestibulum Horridus" are both Sci-Fi Horror allegories about the objectification of women. "Les Amoureux" is arguably also an aesop about expecting relationships to solve all of your problems.
- Arch-Enemy: Dero, the omnipotent genetic engineer, and Nameless, the last pure Homo Sapiens in existence.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Tricia in "The Secret Game". Subverted in that the higher plane divorces one from their human emotions and minds until they are incomprehensible Eldritch Abominations.
- Author Tract: "Vestibulum Horridus", "Sweet Tooth", and, arguably, "Les Amoureux".
- Bee Afraid: Bees are hateful antagonists in both "The Order of Creeping Things" and "Sweet Tooth".
- Bio-Augmentation: In "Human Resources", a deformed geneticist hunts down the last unaltered human with his surgically and biologically altered human monsters. Alternately, two posthumans in the titular tale are sympathetic to the human protagonist and help him to escape Dero's hunt (temporarily).
- Black Comedy: The only kind, and most prevalent in "School Day", "The Backwater Roads" and "The Secret Game".
- Body Horror: Present in virtually every story save "School Day".
- "The Secret Game" has dream-demons that can take any shape they want, such as your childhood crush with tenticular limbs or huge-headed caricature monsters like something out of Deranged Animation.
- "Human Resources" features an asymmetrical human species from the far future with copper-rich skin that always sheds, gigantic, long-fingered right hands and bulbous right eyes. Even if they're not wholly malevolent, it's still pretty unnerving.
- In "Immunity", a man cultivates open wounds, grotesque hygiene and repulsive eating habits to build up an immunity to death itself, becoming part of an inhuman conclave of like-minded abominations in the process.
- And the capper, from "Children of Light and Darkness": a cellar full of human children who have been lobotomized, given limb extensions/reductions, subjected to endless skin grafts and otherwise surgically modified by a seemingly loving foster couple.
- Bookends: "The Backwater Roads" features this most prominently, but "Immunity", "Vestibulum Horridus", and "Sweet Tooth" use it as well.
- Butterfly of Doom: Nameless, the last human in the world, maimed Dero, the ruler of the world, in a past life. The inherited trauma has driven Dero to destroy the world and genetically alter the human race into something unrecognizable to prevent the same thing from happening.
- Cardboard Prison: The dream-devils in "The Secret Game" are rendered almost comically impotent in waking life. If only sleep wasn't necessary.
- Crappy Holidays: "The Secret Game" takes place in December and is Kent Starrett's attempt at a Christmas story.
- Creepy Child: All of them. Addressed in "The Backwater Roads", in that the protagonist, Charlie Gray, is socially isolated for being a creepy child.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: All of them, but especially in "Children of Light and Darkness".
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Dero, the antagonist of "Human Resources".
- Deadly Road Trip: "The Backwater Roads". "Immunity" features one, though not as severely.
- Dreaming of a White Christmas: The predators "that suspend the curtains of reality" can be seen in thick snowstorms, forming out of the whiteout.
- Downer Ending: Arguably all of the stories, to some degree or another. Some of them, like "Immunity" or "The Backwater Roads", might be considered to have a Bittersweet Ending, but only from a certain point of view.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Styrax and Spyrax are a married couple of gargantuan, asymmetrical post-humans in the title story, who treat the protagonist in a friendly if eccentric manner throughout the story.
- Dissonant Serenity: The contrast of the cold, sterile holiday season and the surreal Mind Screw horror of "The Secret Game".
- Eye Scream: Prevalent, but most colorfully used in "Les Amoureux".
- Fantastic Caste System: In "Vestibulum Horridus", the queen of an extradimensional species can breed anything she chooses to, provided she absorbs the right genes from native fauna. She breeds various offspring into existence, all female, whom each have a caste in the One World Order. Meanwhile, in "Human Resources", Dero does the same thing to the whole world, leaving one last unaltered human who he torments for fun.
- Fantastic Racism: The marauding alien race in "Vestibulum Horridus" can't see human men as sentient, and set about lobotomizing, disfiguring and vivisecting them.
- Forced Transformation: "The Secret Game" is themed entirely around this, as well as "Human Resources". "Vestibulum Horridus" and "Children of Light and Darkness" touch upon it as well.
- God Is Evil: In "The Secret Game" and "Vestibulum Horridus", anyway. In "The Order of Creeping Things", the protagonist has this viewpoint because only a malicious and insane deity would fill the world with so many insects and arthropods.
- Gratuitous French: "Les Amoureux" makes use of this, through its reclusive, overtly romantic protagonist.
- Gray-and-Grey Morality: There's never a clear idea of who's in the wrong or right in any of the stories, save perhaps in "Sweet Tooth". "Vestibulum Horridus" makes especially good use of this trope.
- The Grinch: Christmas gets a rather, well, honest evaluation in "The Secret Game", which is set during Christmastime. The opening line even indicates that "Christmastime is an odd time for the Secret Game", which, instead of emphasizing the societally mandated task of human goodwill, emphasizes human insignificance in the vast and unfeeling universe we inhabit.
- Hostile Terraforming: What Mother Superior does to England in "Vestibulum Horridus".
- I'm a Humanitarian: "Sweet Tooth" is about a woman who attracts all of her city's vermin (human and otherwise) with a rare genetic mutation that results in addictive pheromones, which by extension results in everything trying to kill and eat her. This eventually includes her friends, family, and herself.
- Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Viciously deconstructed in "Les Amoureux".
- Medical Horror: "Children of Light and Darkness".
- Mercy Kill: The last pure human in the world decides to kill himself to stop Dero, the genetic engineer who has destroyed the world with his surgically altered posthumans, from continuing to breed monsters and ravage the world endlessly in the title story. In "Sweet Tooth", Marissa commits suicide through Autocannibalism.
- Mind Rape: The predatory beings in both "The Secret Game" and "Vestibulum Horridus" inflict this.
- Neverending Terror: Tricia's fate in "The Secret Game".
- Nothing Is Scarier: Used in "Immunity", "The Secret Game", and "The Order of Creeping Things".
- Omnicidal Maniac: Dero in "Human Resources".
- Our Monsters Are Weird: "The Secret Game" revolves around a girl forced to fight surreal dream-demons by warping her physical body in her own nightmares to combat them. At one point, one of the predators hunts through the girl's childhood home... only to realize that the house itself is the girl, which then begins growing hands from its walls and teeth in its doors and windows. Similarly, "Human Resources" and "Vestibulum Horridus" both revolve around antagonists with the ability to breed nightmarish morphologies into their offspring at will, and the endless parade of living nightmares that they spawn as a result of this.
- Preserve Your Gays: There are three protagonists in "Vestibulum Horridus", two of whom are lesbians in a happy, healthy engagement.
- Pun-Based Title: Take a guess.
- Reality Warper: Tricia, as well as the dream-beings she's gone to war with.
- Schrödinger's Butterfly: Some of the stories leave it up to the reader to decide if the protagonists are really being hunted by reality-warping monsters, an insect conspiracy, or a conclave of masochistic immortals, or if the protagonists are simply suffering from some form of mental illness or delusions.
- Seattle: The setting of "Sweet Tooth".
- The Spook: Karen in "Children of Light and Darkness", as well as Tricia's fate in "The Secret Game".
- Teenage Wasteland: "School Day" and, to a lesser degree, "The Secret Game".
- Transformation Horror: "Children of Light and Darkness", in a way that mirrors real world atrocities, particularly lobotomy, Unit 731 and the Albert Bandura experiments. In a more speculative way, all of the stories except "School Day" feature this.
- Transhuman: In "Human Resources", a deformed, paralyzed scientist uses his mastery of Bio-Augmentation to breed a race of transhumans that wind up wiping out the (original) human race.
- Unreliable Narrator: "The Order of Creeping Things" is the diary of a man who believes that the world's insects are conspiring against him. "The Secret Game" is about a girl who thinks godlike entities are hunting her in her dreams. It's left up to the reader if either of them is telling the truth, or simply insane.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Dero, as well as Karen from "Children of Light and Darkness".
- World of Chaos: Most of the stories take place in one.
- World of Weirdness: As in all of Kent Starrett's works.
