Shelby's TV Dinners

By R.B. Ashton

Shelby's wasted much of her life. Now she's starting to waste other people's.

 

Professional layabout Shelby's main activities include watching TV and eating junk food. When her TV breaks and she's forced to use a vintage set, everything changes. This isn't just any TV she's found – it comes with great power.

 

Unfortunately, the great power given to Shelby is not met with any sense of responsibility.

 

Quite the opposite: Shelby's quickly building an appetite for more, which will get people hurt. Can her friend Brian stop her from becoming a monster? Or will he find himself the next on the menu?

 

Fans of size-bending horror will love this pint-sized tale of a living room giant. Read it today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neringa Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201214159

Book preview

Shelby’s TV Dinners

R.B. Ashton

MMXXI

1

On Thursday, May 18th, my friend Shelby became a murderer. She was drunk at the time, and in a bad place, which isn’t much of an excuse, and my own excuse for not stopping her isn’t any better: I was a bit drunk, too, and plain unable to believe what I was seeing. But in my defence, it was pretty unbelievable. She was a friend since childhood, and I wanted the best for her, no matter how she’d squandered her potential. No matter what she did. You don’t throw away friendship like that, especially not over something that doesn’t entirely make sense.

It all started when she got a replacement TV.

But before we get to that, and how it led to me ending up where I did, let me explain her situation. Shelby didn’t do well after university. An arts degree didn’t exactly set her on a clear career path, and a recession hit right around when we graduated. Well, about six months after we graduated, which was around the time she started looking for work – having blown through her savings. She didn’t travel, she just worked in a pizza kitchen and drank. She found she couldn’t get a better job without experience, and couldn’t get experience without a job. She got rejection after rejection, with maybe four interviews in eighteen months. Two went really badly and one went really well, but she still didn’t get it.

She gradually gave up on everything and it hurt to see it. She stopped going out and even cut her hours at the pizza kitchen. Two years later, she’d lost contact with most of our mutual friends and her family had never really been close, so she resigned herself to a lonely life watching TV and playing video games. She drank and smoked and kept to herself.

I’d always liked her; she was fun, carefree, and yeah, I had a thing for her when we first met. A curvaceous girl with a big, usually messy, head of hair and dark eyes that always looked in the midst of a sly joke. She wasn’t into me, though; she was never really into anyone, that I knew of. I got over it, accepting some people were happy alone, and there were plenty of other girls that caught my eye at uni, but I still enjoyed her company. She was always frank and made me laugh. So when she tried to recede from society, I didn’t want to lose that, and I kept visiting, knowing she needed at least someone on her side.

We settled into a relaxed routine of dinner around hers twice a month. I stopped suggesting going out, as she