“If you challenged someone to come up with the most disgusting thing you could think of, and if you then wrote a novella with that disgusting thing as the central premise, you’d have something like the beginnings of Header.
I put this one in the category of gross horror. The premise and execution are pretty grimy, and the descriptions don’t back down. But it’s all more gross than it is frightening. Or maybe it’s frightening in that it’s so gross.
Really, the weirdest part of this whole thing is reading it at the bus stop, being involved in this fictional world while everyone else around you is seemingly going about their normal business in a normal way. It’s like you found this little pocket of total fucked-up-ness, and you’re in it while the rest of the world is completely unaware.
It’s good to be in those spots now and then. I like to compare it to the first time I rode a motorcycle out on the road. It’s fun, but it’s pretty weird the first time you come to a stoplight. You’re sitting there on a bike while everyone else is in a car. Your feet are touching the ground while you wait, and you feel the heat from the blacktop through the bottoms of your shoes. You’re all of a sudden in this weird, parallel dimension where things are mostly the same, but not quite. “