Try the New Candy

By: Aron Beauregard

Narrated by: Kayll Heath

Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

Taste a new horror.

Which foul flavor amongst these 10 tales of torment and otherworldly strangeness will please your palate? An imbecilic man is taken advantage of for decades before finally considering an act of sweet revenge. A single, soon to be mother experiences a bizarre sequence of events triggered by her artificial insemination. A wide-eyed boy goes along to housesit with his poor excuse for a father, only to find out the property harbors some disturbing secrets. A newly married couple that enjoys pushing their limits to the extreme gets access to a special museum exhibit that is not quite finished. A pervert accidentally slays his mistress during an outlandish sex act, but did she deserve it? Two girls head out to the club to celebrate reaching the legal drinking age only to encounter the most hellish nightlife imaginable.

Choose from all these and more. Step into the shoes of the disturbed fringe of society and explore the potential for evil in humanity. Your misery awaits…

©2019 Aron Beauregard (P)2022 Aron Beauregard

Honestly, could’ve been a little longer

Huge fan nonetheless have always, and will always love your work. Good sir thank you.

Deeply disturbing

I enjoy the disturbing, intense atmosphere/imagery this collection of stories provides. Not for the faint hearted but definitely a fun read, although maybe abit cliche at times. All in all I liked it, Thanks.

a little conflicted

i really enjoyed some of the stories in this book while i really didn’t enjoy some of the others, it’s my second AB book and i don’t know where to go from here. i still recommend it, just know some of the stories are way extreme and others aren’t at all.

Intense and gruesome and AWESOME

Not for everyone but I LOVED it! Also a great backstory for other characters.

Not for the weak

The only complaint I have is the excessive amount of homo/transphobia in the club hell chapter of the book

an entertaining and compelling collection of short stories

while not as grisly and morbid as some of his other work, this is a very good collection of short stories that range from grim to bizarre to touching. recommended for fans or for new readers as an entry point

it was good

I enjoyed almost all of these short stories. first book I've read by him and will look for more. narrator was great too

Cool listen

I enjoyed most of these short stories, but Club Hell left on a weird note and didn’t feel quite satisfying. House Sitting With Dad and Under Construction were definitely the two that stuck with me the most.

loved!

I love the short stories. I think there's something for e everyone. Obviously some are more brutal, but I liked them all.

Baskerville Book Reviews

TRY THE NEW CANDY
Saturday, May 28, 2022
Alright, I hope the rest of this anthology is as good as this story. Even if they’re not, I swear, it’s worth it for this one story. I really loved the whole thing. The setup and the payoff were brilliant. Really though, it’s the wording choices used in the novel at about the halfway point. The slow protagonist being described as “as slow as a crockpot” was fucking hilarious, along with a few others I won’t spoil. I was laughing so hard a the lines, I had to pause to not miss anything. Bravo.

The DONOR
Saturday, June 4, 2022

This audiobook is the gift that just keeps on giving. This story had me grinning and laughing the entire time. Every time I thought the story couldn’t get any better, some new twist came along and proved me wrong. The ending is the best part. Once you figure out what it is, it leaves you waiting with anticipation for the payoff.

HOUSE SITTING WITH DAD
Saturday, June 11, 2022

Damn, that was some twisted shit! I can’t tell if the PoV was supposed to be a 13-year-old or a 7-year-old. Either way, it was just an endless slew of examples from a messed-up childhood that resulted in…. something worthy of being in this book. Wow. That was something else.

FIVE O’CLOCK SHADOW
Sunday, June 12, 2022

This story sent shivers up my spine. It’s less horror and more spooky. I was starting to think it was a dud, as each story is mostly set up and I thought it was running out of time for the payoff. So far, this is my flavorite story in the collection.

STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Saturday, June 18, 2022

I’m all for body horror. This one feels like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Saw. It paints a truly disgusting picture. Everything is described in such detail, that it’s difficult to not picture it clearly in your head.

DID THEY DESERVE IT?
Saturday, June 25, 2022

Yeah, they did. They’re in this story after all. This story in particular just gets worse and worse as it goes on. Not in terms of writing, but the events that are going down. This is a “Shit hit the fan!” in a fan factory kind of story. ahahahaha I kept trying to predict what was going to fappen next and things just kept going further downhill. This is my flavorite one in the collection so far.

THE BREAKDOWN
Saturday, June 2, 2022

Holy shit! This one wins the collection (so far). I was sure I didn’t like it. It just seemed boring and hardly horror related. It didn’t seem like it was going anywhere. Then it picked up and it got a little interesting, albeit predictable. Despite the predictability, I was now invested and it only got better from there. I won’t spoil the ending or even hint at it, all I’m going to say is the ending has made this tied for my flavorite story in this collection.

MORE THAN A FEELING
Sunday, July 10, 2022

This is the only story in this collection that I’m indifferent to. It’s just a bit meh, cumpared to everything else in this collection.

THIS PERSON DOES EXIST
Sunday, July 17, 2022

I was honestly ready to write this one off. I hate SciFi stuff with a passion. But I kept listening and I’m glad I did. It managed to send a shiver down my spine. I usually avoid anything even remotely SciFi, this is one of those extremely rare exceptions where I enjoyed it.

CLUB HELL
July 23, 2022

I’m really not a fan of the words “faggot” or “tranny”. To be honest though, what annoys me the most is how the author kept referring to people having their hands on their abdomens as their stomachs. Your stomach is an internal organ, if you’re 7 and don’t know the difference, that’s one thing. But this is incredibly basic stuff. It’s especially annoying with these body horror stories, as it’s entirely possible that somebody would have their hands on their stomach. The story itself is just meh to me. It’s not as good as the others and I just found myself bored with it.

Narration

My very first impression of the narrator is he sounds like he’s in a hurry. As I occasionally mention, I listen to audiobooks at 2.55x speed. It’s only an issue when a narrator speeds up a scene (E.G. Terry F. Self speeding up combat in the Bloodlines Reforged Saga), or instances such as this. Where the narrator sounds like he’s in a hurry to finish the recording as quickly as possible. He mispronounces the word “prescription”, which I find insufferably annoying. “Perscription” isn’t a word, and neither is “onvelope”.

Final Thoughts

I love it. This twisted collection of stories was the primary inspiration for my own story, aside from the 2 stories I didn’t enjoy, this was a pure joy to listen to every weekend and I’m sad that it’s over.

NOTE: This copy was provided to me free of charge as a digital review copy. The opinions stated in this review are mine and mine alone, I was not paid or requested to give this book a certain rating, suggestion, or approval.