Oh boy, where do I start with this one? As usual, Duchossoy presents a story with a synopsis that seems pretty straightforward but most definitely is not. What begins as a weird day at work ends up being something much bigger.

Ellen works the night shift at a morgue. As you can imagine, that can get pretty creepy. You spend your nights hanging out with corpses. You hear weird noises. Sometimes those noises come from gases escaping the corpses, and when you’re sleep deprived and stressed, things that normally don’t phase you are suddenly startling. While she does her work, we get a little bit of her back story. She is going through a divorce and probably won’t get custody of her son. Her son hates her for reasons we learn later in the story.

While she’s prepping one body for the freezers, another is delivered. There’s something strange about this delivery though. She does not recognize the men who are doing the drop off and they refuse to stop to do paperwork. She is frustrated with this change in routine but there isn’t anything she can do about it. She processes this new body, noting the strange appearance of its face and equally strange texture of its skin. Before she knows it, the van is back with another body. They come and go throughout the night and Ellen is understandably disturbed by the amount of bodies coming in one night. Meanwhile, she and the security guard take a look outside and are confronted by what looks like a dark barrier between the morgue and the rest of the town that is closing in on them. Naturally this frightens Ellen and she decides it’s time to leave work and go home to her son. Getting past the barrier proves to be a challenge, and then what she sees on the other side feels like a fever dream.

I want to take a moment to address the audiobook narration. Louise Cooksey is a new voice to me, but a glance at her collected works on Audible shows that she is no novice. I felt like she did a nice job of portraying Ellen’s emotions throughout. Didn’t love her “man voice”, but it was an otherwise good performance.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for me. There were some parts of Ellen’s story that really resonated with me. Fortunately I don’t think my town will turn into meat anytime soon. In true Duchossoy fashion, this one had me feeling things. It is short and bittersweet. The ending will break your heart.

You can buy Burden, by Matt Duchossoy on Amazon for a couple bucks or read it as part of your Kindle Unlimited subscription. Do it.