Username: Spicy_sweets

Cover:  This cover is deceptively fluffy. The pastels are dreamy. The little girl looks innocent in her adorable Cindy curls. And then you notice the table. The decapitated Teddy Bear, the knife, the flaming balloons, the severed stuff animal limbs, all hinting at the nightmare hidden in plain sight in this sugary landscape. The 'heart' in the title is just the icing on the cake.

Blurb: For Elizabeth, dreams are where she can live out her biggest wish; being the princess of a world with all of her stuffed animals. There, she's respected and constantly showered in love and praise by her fluffy subjects.

But in reality, she only puts fear into their cotton-filled hearts. After being ripped apart and sown back together so many times, it's no wonder why the deformed plushies' angry souls won't rest until they return the favor.

Like the cover, the blurb has that dichotomy of innocence and sweetness against lurking darkness. The first paragraph leads you into the same false sense of security, describing Elizabeth, our little girl protagonist. From here we have all we need to know; she is young, she has a princess complex, and she tortures stuffed animals for fun. That final line really sets you up for an interesting ride. 

First Chapter: This first chapter was a short one but it introduces us to the giggling little girl protagonist with an effective display of her personality in a few paragraphs. Everything is almost idyllic, with a little girl playing hide and seek with her mother, holding Mr. Sheep as she tries to keep quiet under the bed. It almost reads like a children's book until one line. Where the stuff animal falls from her arms, revealing it's cloth belly has been sliced open so its fluffy guts spill forth onto the carpet. When her mother questions why her stuffed animal's been cut open, our protagonist responds: "....I wanted to see his insides, so I cut him up."

Yes, yes we are in for that kind of ride. What really ups the creep factor of this scene is how the mother carries on like nothing untoward happened. The rest of us, well, we are keeping an eye on Elizabeth now. This is why children work so well in horror movies.