Author: Wrath James White

Type of Book: Fiction, novella, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: The extremity of the horror makes it odd by my calculations.

Availability: Published by Deadite Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: For reasons that I have discussed in the past, I have been watching Wrath James White’s writing for a while. I was introduced to him via a collaboration that was so bad it remains in my top ten category for worst books I have ever read (Teratologist was the book, the sort of book wherein the protagonist’s name is spelled three different ways in one paragraph). So I sought out White’s web presence and his well-written, interesting blog did not mesh with the hot mess I had read so I gave him another chance. I next read Book of a Thousand Sins and saw that in some respects, my belief he was a far better writer than Teratologist presented him was justified. There were problems with that story collection, but White got enough right that I was heartened.

Population Zero is pretty much a vindication that my instincts were correct. All the issues that I saw in Book of a Thousand Sins were reconciled. Whereas characters might rant for pages on end in BoaTS,  in Population Zero the protagonist’s issues were woven into the plot and showed a character arc. White’s at times baroque writing style was a bit more restrained in this book and his characterization was excellent. The villain in Teratologist embodied Dean Venture when he declared, “I dare you to make less sense!” (Dean also had a terrible problem with his testicles, and the applicability of me telling you this will become clear as you read my discussion.)

There were some small problems in Population Zero that I am going to get out of the way before discussing all that was fabulous. First, the ending left much to be desired and that may just be my feeling on the matter. But the ending felt rushed and given the amount of energy others expended to get the protagonist to the end point, the ending felt wrong. Additionally, as the protagonist goes about his job, he delivers information that become obsolete with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996; tiny little points of social policy that I suspect only I would nitpick because they aren’t too glaring and because they flow well with the story White is telling. There are some small typos, as well. Someone tries to score “heroine” and a character “grinded” his teeth. They’re minor and not that intrusive, but they’re there.

(And it should be mentioned that if you are a social justice warrior, you will not like this book. The protagonist is very unsympathetic to the obese, to the poor trapped on a social treadmill of bad choices, and pregnancy in all forms. The protagonist is also a mentally disturbed, increasingly unhinged killer. In the past, when such a character had very unpleasant ideas, it was called characterization. In some quarters these days, it is a sign of a greater misogyny and class prejudice. I hardly think it so, but I have now given some of my more socially progressive readers clear warning that this book may not be to their tastes.)

But those are small problems in comparison to the nasty, upsetting, yet strangely compelling trip Todd takes us on. All that White gets right in this book is made all the more amazing because this is a book that oh-so-easily could have become a screed with a caricature for a hero. The protagonist, Todd, is a vegan social worker with a job at the welfare office. Yep, a vegan whose interactions with the mass of people receiving public support emphasize his ideas of zero population growth for humans. Todd is a character whose life could be a stereotype, a shrill condemner cut from the caricature cloth reserved for so many vegan characters. White rises above that, making sure that his gore comes with some excellent characterization. Even as he may appall us, Todd is completely understandable.

Todd suffered horrific losses as a child that could, in a novel content to be simply pulpy, have been fuel enough for some “I hate babies but love animals” rampage, but Wrath’s characterization makes Todd’s reaction to the world fueled from his childhood losses, of puppies and ultimately his family, fodder for something more complex. Todd will end up a killer, but this isn’t a revenge-against-the-world-because-childhood-sucks trope. White sets up neatly how Todd comes to have reasonably rational ideas about zero population growth for humans, a dislike of people who take endlessly from the system without giving anything back, and even his intense anger for people who commit acts of sexual infidelity. And Todd does not even intend to become a killer. He just takes things one step too far one day and as he does this, Wrath writes some scenes of extraordinary violence and gore. But as he kills, Todd is still the environmentalist who rides a bike instead of drives a car, who refuses to eat animals, who gets a vasectomy because he wants no children of his own lest they strain the planet further. Todd is a demented idealist who makes perfect sense.

(Small, ranty aside: Bizarre protagonists who seemingly never make sense are the hallmark of the late Richard Laymon. But Laymon, one of the most talented pulp writers in the last 50 years, could make it work more often than not because he sacrificed believable characters for intense and involved plots. As you groaned as the heroine refused to call the police YET AGAIN, you kept reading because the plot was so compelling. Too many young horror writers who dabble in extremity have picked up the habit of unbelievable characters in the aid of the plot, but never write plots worth the exchange.)

We meet the adult Todd at his job at the welfare office, and had Wrath not begun this book with the earnest, kind, idealistic child Todd had been, it would be very easy to dismiss him as a classist, lookist prick. He loathes those whom it is his job to serve: overweight women with several children, pregnant addicts, men who simply won’t get a job as they sire child after child. But as White writes about all that Todd observes, it becomes clear that the system that asks him to serve people who are at times dreadful has dragged him down into a very unpleasant place. He fantasizes about killing an extremely obese woman with four children and is shaken from his daydream as she asks to be put back on WIC because she is pregnant again. Appalled, Todd cannot stop himself from saying that he would pay for her to have an abortion. When she becomes angry, Todd takes it one step further telling her that if she decides to have an abortion, he will also pay to get her tubes tied, will ensure she has a very easy time getting her benefits in the future and will never have to come into the office again.

The woman’s mouth opened and then she paused. She paused!
She was considering it. She looked down at the mewling infant in her lap with his face stained with baby food and juice, the two-year-old in the stroller beside her reeked from a diaper that needed to be changed an hour ago, the four and five-year-olds still fought over a toy one of them had stolen from the grocery store, and a look of exhaustion and resignation began to take over her face. Tears welled up in her eyes. She began to look helpless and confused.

And if you are a social justice warrior who is still confused about this book, the above passage is a clue. This is a woman for whom life has become very difficult. Her situation clearly does not make her happy and perhaps she has been given the wrong help in life. As her human dignity to reproduce has been honored, no one had given her this way out before. Todd, in his prejudice is doing a good thing, but he can’t see it. Her tears mean nothing to him.

Todd was surprised that he wasn’t touched by it all. For some reason, the plight of a single human never seemed to have the power to move him, not when there were 50,000 species of plant and animal life going extinct every year as we cleared rainforests and turned them into cattle farms so fat whores like this could get cheeseburgers. He wanted to look away but he knew that he had to look sympathetic if he wanted to save his job.

She accepts his offer and he sets everything up for her. Afterwards, he feels peace.

He looked at the long line standing outside the door of his cubicle and for the first time he didn’t feel the usual anxiety. He didn’t feel the desire to run and hide under the desk or flee the building or take an AR15 rifle and mow down everyone in sight and then burn the place to the ground.

For the first time in his nine years working for the Welfare Department, Todd Hammerstein actually felt like he had done some good.

I began with this section to show how it is that I feel that White managed to get so much right. Todd has very unpleasant ideas, and I could humanize him more to you if I reproduced sections of his youth that explain all too clearly why he hates pregnancy and came to have extremist ideas about world population, but that I think needs to go unsaid in this discussion lest it ruin too much. But even though we understand how Todd comes to have these ideas and pity the boy he once was, he’s an unpleasant guy. We later learn his extremism about ZPG helped drive away his girlfriend into the arms of another woman. But Todd is also confronted daily with crowds of people who, in their own way, are as unappealing as he is. Helpless, sad, defeated people whom he often cannot help beyond funding them as they grow unhealthy and despondent. Todd is a complex man facing complex problems. And far from being a very good day, the day he procures an abortion and sterilization for that woman is the beginning of him exercising a diseased hubris that permits him to do the unthinkable.

As Todd offers meth addicts abortions and sterilization in exchange for benefits, he also frequents idealistic ZPG message boards and muses on the state of the planet in a way that foreshadows pretty clearly what is about to happen, but possibly only in retrospect:

Earlier that year he’d watched a documentary on Charles Manson in which Manson had stated that he needed to kill about two million people in order to save the planet. Two million people would hardly be a drop in the bucket in terms of overpopulation and the two unwanted children whose births he had prevented would not make a difference at all. He needed to do more.

It wasn’t until after I was finished reading this book and writing this discussion that I realized that Charles Manson was connected to the murder of just one pregnant woman. Yes, I don’t feel I am spoiling much here when I say that Todd will try to kill more than one pregnant woman. And that he discusses Manson only in terms of his ZPG utterings is telling. Todd is walking closer and closer to being a zealot, turning idealism into something deadly.

Todd is a fan of a ZPG writer named Heimlich Anatolli (a not so cloaked reference to the ZPG author Paul Ehrlich) and Heimlich frequents the message boards that Todd posts to. One day Todd asks if it is advisable to urge pregnant women to abort and Heimlich gives him the message he needs: any child born may be the one that breaks the camel’s back.

And from there Todd is off to the ZPG races. Todd’s zeal to stop pregnancy causes some scenes at work and later one of his coworkers reveals she is part of a larger ZPG cabal and serves as a sort of deus ex machina when Todd’s back is against the wall. I found those parts of the book, as well as the ending, far less interesting than Todd and his complex justifications and extreme rage. White has Todd dissemble in a manner that I typically associate with the skill of Ruth Rendell, who arguably handles the diseased mind better than any writer today. And his relationship with his ex-girlfriend is also not as interesting, though it helps show what an absolute zealot Todd is, even as he knows he is missing out on having the life he wants.

The mayhem really starts when Todd thinks he will start offering DIY sterilizations. He offers a vasectomy to a young man who killed his chances to have a basketball career because he had children right out of high school. Unmarried with four children, Todd wonders how many more children the man would create before he died and offers him the vasectomy. The kid refuses so Todd lures him to his apartment with an offer of special job training. And it is about here, gorehounds, where the content will become relevant to your interests.

It’s funny, in a very dark way, how Todd justifies what he plans to do. He muses:

It’s not like I’m going to kill the guy. I’m just going to fix him. They don’t call vets psychotic when they neuter dogs against their will. This is the same thing, isn’t it?

Well, generally, one does not have to get a stun gun, hand cuffs, duct tape and instructions from Google on how to neuter a dog because vets have years of training and dogs are not very tall young men who had a shot at the NBA and could kill you for even looking too long at their testicles.

Oh my God. Maybe I am crazy?

He tried to console himself with the notion that crazy people didn’t know they were crazy, so if he thought that he was going crazy then he must still be sane. It was slim comfort though. He couldn’t bullshit himself.

But as he thinks he is nuts and tries to think of a way out of it, the young man comes to the door and Todd zaps him with the stun gun. He rolls him up in duct tape and… You know, I am not going to reproduce any of the extreme violence Todd wreaks. It needs to be read as it comes in the book. But Todd does manage to sterilize the poor man. The man passes out from the pain and is enraged when he wakes.

Todd looked up at the ceiling and tried to gather his thoughts, to find the words to make the big man understand.

“Do you know that it took hundreds of thousands of years for the world’s population to reach one billion and in the 200 years that followed, it has more than quintupled? The world’s population has tripled since 1980 to 6 billion people, and is expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050. For every one of those 6 billion people on Earth nearly six tons of carbon dioxide is spewed into the air annually. Do you realize that one human being generates over 1,569 pounds of waste a year? That’s nearly 125,000 in a lifetime, sixty-two tons! And that’s just one person! Half of the land on the earth has already been built on, paved over, and otherwise altered so that it is almost uninhabitable by any species other than humans and the insects and vermin that thrive off of us. And as the population continues to grow we’ll need to convert even more land into habitable space for humans, meaning uninhabitable space for almost everything else. How can we allow that? Fifty percent of the world’s original forests have been destroyed as a result of massive land clearing for housing, roads, agriculture, and industries. Do you get what I’m saying? Do you even give a fuck? Your sperm cells are destroying the planet! So I had to stop you. I had to stop you from reproducing.”

Yeah, the neutered man doesn’t really care, as he’s been operated on sans anesthetic and is prone on the floor, wrapped in duct tape. And it’s right about here that Todd realizes he has not thought his plan through. Those forcibly sterilized by a welfare office lunatic go to the police when released.

So Todd does what he has to do to remain at large. Oh, and he does it completely naked and not as a means of evidence control. He’s just naked because he’s pretty insane. Did I mention he had an erection, too? Sorry to bring it up.

Todd has not completely spun out of control. He has enough acuity and loathing that when his hero, Dr Heimlich Anatolli is arrested as a terrorist, Todd begins to see himself as a one-man force to prevent the planet from having children. And while he regrets killing the man he neutered, such feelings of regret do not stand a chance against the demented zeal spurring him on.

And he begins to abort and sterilize but doesn’t shed tears when his methods kill the potential breeder. There is a scene where Todd targets a home for unwed mothers that was so profoundly over-the-top in terms of sheer gore that you have to read it to believe it. I should also mention I read half this book waiting to see my gynecologist. It bothers me how little I was fazed when I read the scene in the unwed mother’s home.

The rest of the book reveals the cabal and an unpleasant truth about Todd’s ex-girlfriend, but the real focus for me was Todd as he became completely unstrung. He was a mix between a spree killer and a calculated terrorist. His rampage to achieve a small measure of ZPG is truly a gift to gorehounds everywhere. This book is a near-perfect marriage of gore with careful plot and excellent characterization. Were it not for the ending this would be a five-star read.

If you have the stomach for it, I say read it. An eco-warrior run amok. A damaged human being striking out. Tons of gore, but plenty of attention to details that don’t involve blood and feti. Subtle examinations of the welfare system via broadly painted examples. White manages to tell a very large story in a very slim book. This novella ensured that I will keep reading White, whose skill seems to improve with each effort.

Author: Brian Keene

Type of Book: Novella, short story collection, extreme horror, zombies (kind of)

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: There are some scenes in this book that classify as extreme horror, which I always consider odd when compared to mainstream tastes.

Availability: Published by Deadite Press in 2011, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Let me begin Day Four of Zombie Week by reminding everyone that I am giving away a free copy of every book I discuss this week to one lucky reader. That’s right – five books, one box, you could totally strike it book-rich. How do you enter to win? Easy as pie. Just leave me a comment on any of my Zombie Week book discussions. If you want to increase your chances to win, leave me a comment on each of the five book discussions. I count each comment each day as a separate entry, with a maximum of five chances to win. All you have to do is make all those five comments (or two of four or however many) by 9:00 pm CST, 4/1/11.

Now, let me begin this discussion by saying outright that this book very likely cannot be considered a zombie book by purists, and even I, a zombie novice, am reluctant to call the characters in Jack’s Magic Beans anything but berzerkers. If you have read One Rainy Night by Richard Laymon, you might consider its rain-demented characters to be very similar to the violence-bound, utterly mad characters in Keene’s novella. People acted upon by an unseen force become unspeakably violent, and while the character motivations and victim/hero situations are different, that was one of the best references I could think of in trying to explain the lunatic berzerkers in Keene’s novella.

Why did I read this and include it, then? Well, couple of reasons, really. I had Zombie Week planned out for about a month in advance, only to realize that one of the books I had selected was so short and shallow that, even in my most verbose state, I would have to pad a 200 word discussion. Okay, replaced it at the last second with another book. Then I went online to buy the copies I am giving away and realized the Keene book I wanted to discuss, The Rising, is out of print and I needed to read something else fast or I would be screwed. I had a copy of Jack’s Magic Beans on hand already, so I just decided to go with it. I do these “weeks” for my own benefit, so don’t imbue much nobility in what I am about to say, but I infinitely prefer it if my efforts here produce sales for the authors whose work I discuss. That won’t happen with The Rising because of Keene’s travails with Dorchester Press/Leisure Books, which have made for horrific reading in and of themselves.

If I discussed that very excellent zombie book of Keene’s, a book that is most decidedly a zombie book, he wouldn’t have received a cent if anyone bought it, and he wouldn’t have received a penny if I managed to find a new copy for my giveaway. Worse, there is every likelihood a e-book sale could in some manner enrich Dorchester Press because despite restoring his copyright, even for electronic books, Leisure Books still continue to sell his e-books illegally across various venues. Keene is not the only author who has been exploited by Dorchester. In fact, Brian Keene got his rights returned to him in exchange for unpaid royalties and yet Dorchester continues to sell works they no longer own the rights to. Because of this, I will not purchase another new book or e-book released by Dorchester Press or any of its imprints and I urge others to do the same. I generally do not participate in boycotts because it all too often only hurts those who can least afford it. But this time, it’s pretty clear that those at the bottom, the authors themselves, will not be receiving any money anyway. Dorchester’s been stiffing their writers since 2008 and any money given to the press cannot be relied upon to make it into the writers’ pockets. This is one of those boycotts where the people who get hurt are going to be hurt either way, and in such a case, why give the company a dime?

Much of the recent news of Dorchester’s wrong-doings came out after I decided just to discuss berzerkers under the wide banner of zombies, because as I perversely maintain, my site, my judgment call, but it also felt good to do this one little thing to help out an author whose work is excellent and who, by my own personal experience, is a good man. Yes, I met Brian Keene and if he remembers it, it is because he either feared for his well-being or just has an excellent memory.

I met him at Staples 2007. Staples is an independent media conference that in the past was comic-heavy but is sliding into other avenues. I am not known as a person who does well in crowds. Or in public. Or in small spaces or in places where you can’t rely on people all walking in the same direction. I won’t go so far as to say I have OCD or agoraphobia and whatever it is when you just cannot bear being around people, but I am pretty nuts. I’m actually a lot better now. I can make eye contact without screaming and I can navigate the supermarket without crying. But in 2007 I was a complete mess.

My poor spouse, a comic book nerd, wanted to go to Staples and I decided to go because I thought, “What can happen in a room full of comic nerds? I’ll be there with him, I can walk around in a relatively safe space and maybe I won’t vomit on myself. Again.” (Note: I am exaggerating for comedic effect. Slightly)

This was a good plan. In theory. But in public, I am also easily distracted and I got separated from my beloved because it was a lot more crowded and unruly than I had expected. One second I was looking at a comic about a Squirrel Girl, and the next I was alone in a sea of hipsters. Mr Oddbooks thought that I would have enough sense to keep close to him, you know, given that fact that I am the one with the issues and all. But no, I didn’t and there I stood, gawping at Squirrel Girls, wondering if I could literally die from panic.

I did my best not to just freak the hell out but if you have ever seen a feral cat locked in a bathroom, you know what I looked like. I sort of ricocheted around, looking for Mr Oddbooks and doing my best not to make eye contact with anyone lest I scream or cry or do anything else unseemly. I glanced around me at knitted cthulhu hats, comics about crap, comics about nothing, and had anyone asked me my name I would not have been able to answer. And then I saw in an ocean of stuff that meant nothing to me an oasis of calm. There was a table with books on them. Paperback books.

I wandered over and there sat Keene. I looked at the books, I looked at him, and then the fliers with his picture and pictures of the same books on the table and said the most intelligent question that all authors love. “Did you write these books?” I blurted like a complete asshole.

“Yeah,” he answered. And from there I remember nothing. You know how you talk to a dog and all they hear is tone? And you can basically call your dog an asshole to his or her face and they have no idea as long as you are talking sweet to it? Well, Keene could have been telling me I was an idiot and he planned to have me killed later, but he did it in a such a nice, avuncular tone that I calmed down and was able to talk for a few minutes until Mr. Oddbooks found me. I say “talk.” I’m pretty sure I babbled. I do remember one thing. I assume Keene knew he was dealing with an advanced case of anxiety because I seem to recall his eyes getting a little crinkly, the way people do when they are vaguely amused but not willing to completely crush a weird person’s dignity. Chances are, in that mass of weirdos, I was utterly unremarkable and he has no idea that as a kind book man in a room full of very young, very loud people, he was a calming presence that kept me from running amok until my husband tracked me down and more or less held on to my shirt tail until we left. But he did. And I appreciated it. And though I remember very little of the few minutes he talked to me, I remember enough to think very highly of him. I mean, for all I know, zaftig, panicked, incoherent women were the order of the day, but never fail to underestimate how the smallest kindness can impact someone.

Yeah, that’s right. That crazy woman you’re kind to could someday begin a small book blog and speak highly of you. Let that be a lesson to all of us.

Mr. Oddbooks had spent all our cash on HP Lovecraft art and collections from that guy with the drunken crow and sock monkey and that other guy who uses old drawings and creates wildly inappropriate captions so I was unable to return to Keene’s table and buy his books. But when I got home I bought three of his books off Amazon and I know this whole tale of my sorry mental state and tendency to romanticize casual encounters with normal, polite folk means some of you may think I am going to give this book a five-star review. Well, I am, but my uneasy mental state also forces me to be sickeningly honest. If it had been a bad book, I would have given it a crappy review. I would have agonized over it, but it would have happened. But this really is an excellent book.

Jack’s Magic Beans has the novella of the same name, as well as four additional short stories. I will discuss under a cut the short stories that accompany the berzerker tale so as not to annoy those readers who came only for the zombies and want me to shut the hell up about thieving publishers, my irritating but ultimately charming mental illnesses and anything that isn’t at least close to being zombie-related.

If you have read Brian Keene, you may not think him that odd – and mostly his work isn’t – but the extremity of the content ensured that even if I did not have a Zombie Week, his works would have ended up here. He straddles a line between regular horror and extreme horror, but my arbitrary metrics are that if it might gross out my mom, who is a sturdy old broad in her own right, the book is a good fit for IROB. Much of Jack’s Magic Beans would have given my mama pause.

Though the average reader will likely sense what is going on by the fifth page in the book, I’m going to be very cagey in my review because I really do not want to spoil this book. If you don’t win the copy I am giving away, you need to order this book, so I don’t want to ruin anything. However, like in Agranoff’s The Vegan Revolution… with Zombies, a common but sometimes controversial element of modern life is involved in a zombie-like armageddon. In Agranoff’s book, this element, Stress-Free meat, causes the zombie apocalypse. In Keene’s novella, the plot element saves a few souls from the madness that grips people and turns them into insane killing machines.

In Jack’s Magic Beans, people are going about their day as they notice the people around them are getting tense and angry, tenser and angrier than people become even in long grocery lines and in traffic. Then everyone snaps. Everyone outright snaps and begins to kill violently and indiscriminately. Four people find themselves unaffected by the madness that is gripping the slaying madmen around them, hiding in a walk-in freezer in the back of a supermarket and they eventually discover what it is that they have in common, a shared trait that is the reason they remained sane when everyone else lost it.

This is one of those stories that I wish was longer. Why everyone lost their minds is likely not important, but damn it, I want to know. And we get only a brief look at the world that remains when the survivors step out of the freezer. It’s hard to know the world ended but not see how the survivors maneuver in what remains of civilization. But sometimes you got to love a story for what it is and not what you want it to be. I always find it to be a slightly backhanded compliment to wish that a story was more than what it is, but in this case, I think it is just a natural reaction to reading a good story.

Zombie purists may snert at the idea of berzerkers as zombies but Mr Oddbooks, who is much more knowledgeable in these matters, explained that there is, in one particular zombie mythos, an actual class of zombies that are called “berzerkers.” I have not investigated this myself but he insists that zombie berzerkers are sadistic and relentless. He also mentioned they tend to be solitary but it really doesn’t matter much because as I go on, I am increasingly discovering that there really is no one mythos and the reactions to canons come fast and quick. The berzerkers in this book are definitely not undead, are mortal, and are capable of higher thought though that thought is focused exclusively on killing. They also don’t eat their kills. But they are nearly unstoppable and violent in disturbing ways. But even if you are not here just for the violence, this book will satisfy your need for intelligent horror. There is a subtext in the book, a sort of unstated social commentary about the state of sanity and how useful such a state may or may not be when the worst happens.

But it’s also loony, in a good way. Take the opening sentence:

The lettuce started talking to Ben Mahoney halfway through his shift at the Save-A-Lot.

Don’t let yourself go astray. The title isn’t Jack’s Magic Blotter Acid. What does the lettuce say to Ben?

…when he saw the old woman squeezing the peaches and the lettuce told him to kill her, Ben agreed. It seemed like a reasonable idea.

I once worked in a supermarket. I managed Candy City at the Westlake Hills Albertsons for three horrific months. And every time I saw customers reach into my bins with their fucking hands, I secretly killed them in my head. But I didn’t need the violated Jelly Bellies to tell me to do it (and yeah, if you value your health, don’t buy bulk foods that come in scoop-able bins – take my word, people).

“Go on, Ben,” the lettuce urged. “Make her bleed.”

“How do you know my name?”

“We are the lettuce. We know everything. It has always been thus and always will be. The lettuce is wise. Now kill that old bag.”

It was hard to argue with lettuce.

And with the first couple of pages representing, it’s hard to argue this isn’t going to be one helluva story.

We go from some humor into full-force, vomit-worthy bloodshed. Gorehounds will want this book. Keene doesn’t pull any punches with his violence. There was a scene in this book that set off my “Oh, hell no!” response, the same response I had when I first realized there was a baby in The Hills Have Eyes.

A little boy lay sprawled on his stomach in front of her. Blood trickled from one of his ears. As she passed by, he reached for her, his tone pleading.

“Please help me.”

Sammi paused, but before she could act, an adult grabbed the child’s feet and dragged him away.

“Come on, kid. Let’s get you on the butcher’s block.”

If Keene is willing to go that extra mile and have kids slain in this book, rest assured that fans of extreme horror will not be disappointed with the rest of the content.

I also like that Keene does not mind getting all meta with it. Take this quote, for example, from when the four survivors, Jack, Angie, Sammi and Marcel, are tossing around theories about what could have caused the horror they find themselves in:

“Terrorists.” Marcel got to his feet. “Al Qaeda, or maybe some homegrown group like those Sons of the Constitution motherfuckers. Maybe they dropped some gas on us.”

“How?”

“They could have used a crop-duster or something, Like what happened in that little town in Pennsylvania a few years ago. That chemical got released from a hot air balloon and made the rain purple, and then everybody died? Supposedly they all went insane before they were killed. Remember that?”

“I do,” Sammi whispered. “I had nightmares about it for weeks. Those poor people…”

Yep, that’s totally a reference to Keene’s story, “Purple Reign.” Which also may be why I thought of Laymon’s book about black rain that made everyone go berzerk. Good writers can mine similar veins and still create works that aren’t derivative (also think Stephen King’s The Mist). And god help me, Keene fans who read here, but I know I have read at least one reference to the Sons of the Constitution in one of Keene’s short stories but I have no idea if they are a peripheral group, part of an idea that he will eventually revisit or if I just haven’t read enough of his works yet.

This next little bit of meta was sort of sad, actually, considering the whole Dorchester debacle, and the very real fact that writers have a whole world of worries aside from just having to come up with unique ideas, write and write well, edit and then find a paying market for their work. This scene occurs before the shit hits the fan:

Tom Brubaker had a headache and shouting made him feel better. After he was done hollering at Ben Mahoney, he shouted at the cashiers and the butchers and the baggers and a delivery guy and the little old Asian woman who ran the grocery store’s Chinese kiosk. Then he yelled at Jeremy Geist, the short, pudgy kid who was re-arranging the book and magazine display.

“Damn it, Geist. How many times do I have to tell you? Every book should be faced out. People are more likely to buy the fucking things if they can see the goddamned covers.”

Mr Brubaker arranged the books on the shelf so that the front covers were facing outward. “See? How hard is this?”

I have no idea if, perhaps, Mr Keene has seen a few really disorganized displays that featured a few of his books, but it does make you wonder. These meta quotes are also a good example of the sort of muted but clever undertone that frequently shows itself in the book. Nothing smarmy or overly cute but definitely a sense that you will be rewarded if you read closely and have a few of Keene’s books under your belt.

But then there are moments that are outright funny. Continuing on with the book display, and Mr. Brubaker’s demented anger is just getting worse.

Brubaker’s headache vanished. He glanced back to the shelves. Each of the paperbacks had the same title: KILL ‘EM ALL.

It was very sound advice. After all, these were bestsellers written by important authors who knew what they were talking about. Oprah said these books had meaning and value. Oprah said these books would enrich your life. You couldn’t argue with Oprah. That was crazy.

So he didn’t. Instead, Brubaker wrapped his hands around Jeremy Geist’s throat and squeezed.

I am almost certain I am not the only one who likes my unspeakable violence mixed with some humor, no?

So you’ve not got a wholly zombie book here, but that shouldn’t bother you. You have berzerkers causing the apocalypse. You have two scrappy survivors with two unsteady survivors facing the horror locked in a freezer and then struggling in the bloody aftermath. You have some really in-your-face violence with some muted but sly and some not-so-muted but amusing humor. You’ve got four bonus stories I will discuss briefly under the cut. Best of all, where my pedantic heart is concerned, this book is the best edited effort to come out of Deadite and I hope this is an example of a trend to come of finely edited books. You want this book. If you don’t win the copy I am giving away, you should pony up the bucks and buy it yourself.  And then you should check the Deadite site and note when The Rising is going to be re-released and buy a copy when you can.  It’ll then be clear why it was my first choice for Zombie Week.

Okay, tomorrow we end with another hybrid, with intelligent zombies, a fine line between what it means to be a human and means to be a zombie, a truly frightening apocalypse, and a dwindling food source. You don’t to miss that book, and be sure to leave comments so you have a chance of winning a copy.

There are four short stories that accompany Jack’s Magic Beans. And the hell of it is, it’s hard to talk about any of them without spoiling them. But I’ll share as much as I can without ruining them.

“Without You” was the weakest of the four. It’s the story of a man who is sick of his life but takes very seriously the promise he made to his wife many years ago, that he would die without her. The only reason I consider it the weakest is because it’s a little predictable but that’s a small criticism because the characterization ensures that the reader feels the protagonist’s misery in a palpable way.

“‘The King’, In: Yellow” is another story of people being made into creatures that are separated from their mind. A play featuring characters who may or may not be dead titans of rock drive the people in the audience out of their minds. But there is also a couple who wander through the streets and you just know this is not a quest that is going to end up showing them anything they want to know.

“I Am an Exit” and “This is Not an Exit” are the tales of a unique killer and that’s about all I can say. I will mention that these stories were so supremely creepy that I made Mr Oddbooks, whose tastes run to graphic novels, Patrick O’Brien novels and computer manuals, read them and he agreed they were truly… eerie? unexpected? Unsure exactly how to express it but these were two of the tightest, most interesting short stories I have read in a while. Keene says he will eventually write a novel about the killer in these two stories. I will be all over that when it happens. But until then, I will leave you with a quote from “This Is Not an Exit”:

I am swift. My avatar is a hummingbird. Metaphorically, speaking. I move through the night at eighty miles per second, traveling from blossom to blossom, taking their nectar and moving on.

Knowing that this is a killer speaking should make that description suddenly seem very creepy. This sentence also shows how Keene is a writer who cares deeply about language. There is a ridiculous misconception that horror writers are pulpy, in it for the plot, the fun, the gore. Keene is in it for those three things, but he is also in it to spin artful images and scenes that transcend the experience of simply reading them.

Author: Andre Duza

Type of Book: Extreme horror, zombies, fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: This is one that would have been discussed here whether Zombie Week happened or not. It’s a strange book and it’s published by an Eraserhead imprint.

Availability: Published by Deadite Press in 2005, you can get a copy here:

Comments: First, let’s get my site business out of the way. This is Zombie Week and there are five free books to be won by a single, lucky reader. How do you enter the contest to win the five books I am discussing this week?
1) Leave me a comment on any of the five Zombie Week book discussions.
2) You can increase your chances of winning by leaving a comment on all five discussions because each comment on each entry counts as an entry to win the books. Only one comment per entry counts, but that still means you will increase your chances of winning if you comment each day.
3) There is no time frame on when you must comment except to say that you must have all your comments posted by 9:00 pm CST on 4/1/11. So if you wait until the last minute or don’t get wind of Zombie Week until the last minute, you can leave comments whenever you like as long as you make them all by the end of the contest cut-off.

Any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Now to the book. Dead Bitch Army is an excellent follow up to Monday’s zombie offering because it violates, alters and subverts the zombie canon. Duza’s book may cause purists to argue over his use of zombies (or rather one zombie), but fans who love a good, nasty tale of revenge, blood, guts and just plain nastiness will love this book.

I am torn, and this is one of those reviews that I hate giving because there is nothing worse for me than seeing the amazing potential of a book, recognizing clear talent, but feeling as if the potential was not realized and the talent needed a bit of redirection. There is also nothing worse than damning a writer with faint praise so let me just state plainly what didn’t work in this book and what did.

Brief plot summary: Natasha Armstrong has been tracking the Dead Bitch, a woman named Mary Jane Mezerak, also known as Bloody Mary, and her small but creepy collection of hangers-on for years. She believes the Dead Bitch Army kidnapped her son, and after years of brutal entanglements, Natasha is framed for some of the Dead Bitch Army murders and ends up in prison. She is exploited by a reporter, a sort of dogpatch Barbara Walters named Linda Ludlow, who is later shown in an extremely brutal way that Natasha, “Tasha,” was not deranged and that she especially was not a murderer. Linda helps Tasha break out of prison and Tasha confronts the Dead Bitch Army at a gothic gathering on New Years Eve, 1999. The confrontation does not go as planned, and the end of the book is both sad, sobering and a good set up for a sequel.

Now, in terms of zombies, Mary is not a zombie Dr Dale would recognize. She does not attack people to eat them, though her clan does eat the bodies. She does not use her mouth as a weapon. Rather, her murders are for revenge, though some appear to be the result of just the desire to mindfuck because she is a deranged, otherworldly creature. She is very much capable of higher thought, as she organizes and runs her small army, uses weapons and, of course, is fueled by vengeance. She did die, and came back from the dead for reasons that are not entirely clear to me (and more on that in a moment), so in that she is a typical zombie. And while she is rotting and eventually may fall to pieces, her rot has been slow and she seems more mummy-like, with bones protruding from dry skin, and tissue like fragile silk falling away from her face. Of all the novels I discuss this week, this one presents the least amount of zombie for your buck, and we end up understanding far more about Tasha, Linda, and Mary’s ex-husband than we do about Mary herself. I am unsure if that is a problem, as keeping Mary enigmatic is sort of creepy, but keeping so much of that information from the reader makes it hard to really understand the point behind Mary needing the army or her desire to see the world end. We get tantalizing clues, but none of it ever pans out in terms of cold, hard explanation.

There are many instances wherein I wanted to just find Andre Duza’s phone number and call him up and ask him to explain. Here are some plot issues I had:
–Mary’s father was a high priest in a religion called the Church of 1000 Earthly Delights, an “Ergeister” religion and her father inculcated Mary in tales of violence, hexes, and Armageddon, and so we get a sense of where she gets her desire for revenge and her desire to see the world end. The church is mentioned also as the place where Mary met her right hand man, Griff, a telepath. So the church is important but it is never explained why. The beliefs of the church, how it might be linked to Mary rising from the dead set on vengeance, are never explained aside from a sort of primal anger that her ex-husband lived while she and their unborn child died. If her rage is something no one is expected to understand, there are too many potential explanations that go no where.
–Mary died in a fatal accident (and god help me but I don’t recall how she died) when she was pregnant. She was married to a football star, who is not gonna set the world on fire with deep morality but didn’t seem like such a bad guy. But Mary rises from the dead with a rabid desire to track down Carl Mezerak and kill him, which she does in a scene that is quite gory and sickening and will satisfy any gorehound. But why? Why did she hate Carl so much? Carl smokes way too much weed, has a wandering eye and is kind of a cad but I don’t ever see him doing anything to create a need for beyond the grave vengeance. If so, it isn’t supported by the text. So Mary’s deep need for revenge against her husband is odd. Add to it that it took her years, and I mean years, to finally kill Carl, and her psychotic drive for vengeance makes even less sense.
–We find out in the book that Mary and her army wanted Natasha to follow them. Griff, whose mind can alter reality for an entire crowd of people, implanted ideas in Tasha’s head, letting her know where they would be. Why? Why did they need this one woman, who is not believed, to follow them for years? Mindfuck? If so, that was one of the more pointless mindfucks I have ever read.
–There are political side plots that, in my opinion, sap the Dead Bitch of her power, or at least the implied power that I assume is there because of the strange church and her unrelenting violent tendencies.
–There are so many peripheral characters with deeply interesting but truncated stories that it’s hard to know if you are meant to absorb their part of this book because it is going to be important later or if it is just a throwaway with a tiny bit of relevant information. This is all the more distracting and disconcerting because two of those side stories wherein you wonder, “Who the hell is this person, where did he/she come from, and what the hell does any of this mean,” you are also reveling the utter creepiness and nastiness.

It took me much longer to read this book than I would have liked because I, being the sort of person who is certain there is order in the universe, was certain that there was an explanation for all these plot dead ends, that all those characters who popped up with no explanation, that all those asides about the church, Carl and his girlfriend, hallucinations, people kidnapped, a shootout, must play a part in the plot or Duza would not have wasted so much time. So I backtracked and tried to find the link I felt I missed and of course, I never found it. While I am not going to go so far as to recommend that anyone buy and read this book, if you do, I encourage you to handle the book in this manner: Read the parts with Mary, Tasha, Griff, Carl and Linda as the novel. Had I been the editor for this book, all those side plots of the train car going missing, the shootout at the end, the kidnapped people, the girls hiding in the bathroom would have been cut out and run with the last few strange chapters in the book called “The B-sides.” Or I would have cut them and the B-sides out entirely and encouraged Duza to flesh them out slightly and put them in a collection of short stories that were all strangely linked together. So if you read this for the gore and the at times damn excellent writing, just ignore that which is not Mary, Tasha, Linda, Carl or Griff and read the rest later as bonus short stories.

And my common Eraserhead lament of less than stellar editing comes up again. Sorry. I know that many who come for the gore and foulness may not care if a nauseated character “wretches” and frankly, as I also always say, mistakes happen. They happen. Even in the best edited books released by the largest publishers who have tons of money to pay lots of copy editors. But this one was really problematic because there weren’t just usage issues. Sentences ended in the middle and never picked up again anywhere else. Words in the middle of paragraphs were missing the first letter. There were spacing issues that defied any logic as to why a human being didn’t catch them and, frankly, these problems were distracting.

But there are some reasons why you might want to read this book about a Dead Zombie Bitch and her army of freaks and their quest to bring about the end of the world so they can rule the Earth. First, it is a book wherein a completely different kind of zombie rampages. She is in complete control of her faculties, despite the violence that dominates her mind. She doesn’t shamble. She moves in stop motion. She isn’t mindlessly attacking people for food. She may eventually eat her kills but for Bloody Mary, the confusion and terror she creates, the sort of theater she produces around her kills, is the point of the hunt. She is rotting slowly, but very slowly, reminding me more of an undead, demented Miss Havisham more than she reminds me of anything you will see in a Romero movie. There is something very Biblical to her rage and there is something very Victorian to her rot. She died and came back for reasons that are not entirely clear to me but she is a mythos unto herself. When you read this book, for all its flaws you will not be reading anything derivative.

Second, despite the fact that the book often read like a short story collection got spliced into a novel, within the totality of each story, side story and character, Duza creates interesting characters, creepy situations, unsettling scenarios and some outright terrifying, disgusting prose. I won’t spoil the plot points of what happens to Linda Ludlow, but the way she is finally shown that Tasha is not a delusional spree killer is absolutely sickening, a profoundly disturbing scene. For those who want a fix of nasty, this scene may be worth the price of admission.

But there are other examples of some very good writing. That Duza can write horrific content this well is one of the reasons I didn’t dismiss the book as I muddled through the plot. Take this section where Mary has finally attacked Carl, finding him in the middle of kinky sex with a new girlfriend.

The second blast blew Sharlene’s head apart. The bulk of it ended up all over Carl’s face and in his mouth. The impact threw the remaining flap of Sharlene’s head to the right, where it smacked her shoulder and bounced back. The whole thing happened so fast that poor Sharlene never knew what hit her.

[...]

Tightening her hand around the sawed-off, Mary watched in silent ecstasy as Carl bounced from wall to wall, bound to Sharlene’s body, which twitched uncontrollably. His massive arms worked frantically against Sharlene’s flailing limbs. Her fingers grabbed his face and forced their way in and out of his nose and mouth.

“Git her off me! Git her off-a-me!” Carl kept his face turned as far as he could from Sharlene’s and promised himself that he’d never take another breath, not if it meant tasting one more drop of her saline blood. He pretended not to hear the flatulent bursts that accompanied the blood that oozed from her cranium.

Yeah, this may be the worst conclusion of consensual bondage sex I have ever read. Just the horrific implications of being bound, in mid sex act, to a person who got a shotgun blast in the head and is suffering from pre-death brain flailings, is bad enough. Then add in the fact that the sheer indignity of it all, while horrific, is just a little funny, just makes me uncomfortable, and I like it when I am made uncomfortable.

This is not a case of a writer trying to create a horrific scene and having it verge into the ridiculous. Duza, for all the plot failings in this book, has a tight grip on his characters and on the things they do. His horrific slapstick was intentional, to make the reader feel sort of sick as they fight a small grin. There is another example of this, in one of the subplots that was only tangentially related to the rest of the book. Tasha has taken shelter on the run from the Dead Bitch Army in the basement of a bar, where there is what appears to be the dead body of a young black man, shot by the racist proprietor of the bar after he found his daughter having sex with the young man. A couple of days after being shot, the kid, merely brain damaged, rises and goes after the man who shot him. Joe, the racist dad and tavern owner, has greased back hair, really bad aim, and a series of events set his hair on fire:

He knew that it was all over if he fainted. The flames were halfway down his back. STOP! DROP! AND ROLL, YOU IDIOT!

His mind began to wander as it struggled to overcome the pain and fear, both of which worked together to bring him down. Joe tried his best to get a grip on the situation.

1. Need water.
2. The sink behind the bar is broken. You’ve been doing the dishes in the bathroom for the past week.
3. Gotta find something big enough to… God it hurts so bad… something like a toilet…

Joe broke from his daze and sprinted into the bathroom.

Will Joe get the water he needs? Uh oh, his friend Paul is tripping balls on acid in the bathroom, peeing sitting down, when his friend aflame rushes in.

Paul lowered his head to get a look under the stall door.

“Joe?” Paul said, curious. Paul recognized the worn boots and jeans that Joe wore every day.

Paul smelled charred meat. He was hiking his pants up, preparing to stand, when the stall door flew at him and found his teeth.

And that’s where we leave Joe and Paul and are certain Joe’s likely gonna cook some more.

But there are moments of utter creepiness that don’t invoke humor or even attempt to be anything more than just a look at the delirium of horror that Mary’s army can dish out. Again, not discussing it in depth but the torture scene and the aftermath when Linda learns Tasha was telling the truth all along is an upsetting, repellent, effective scene. But being able to marry such mayhem with a sense of the absurd helps when reading a book like this.

So this is how this zombie book boils down: An atypical zombie, a hardcore woman, has a thirst for vengeance I am unclear about and the narrative is muddled with an often unclear plot and irrelevant characters. However, had an editor cleaned this up, Duza’s prose is excellent and with a buzz-killing hellbeast of an editor keeping his active imagination from running amok, I can see Duza’s next book being sound in all respects. But the interesting thing about this book is that while a zombie is the impetus of the action, she is just one character in a book teeming with characters. She is a force of chaos but in a completely different way than brain-dead but flesh-seeking zombies are. She wants an apocalypse but must rely on political unrest to get it. She is a cult symbol, and not at all feared the way a traditional zombie would be (though that’s a mistake for those who are unlucky enough to meet her). Her goal is not to munch intestines but to lure people into her army. But it’s interesting to me that Duza subverts the paradigm, creating chaos with one zombie rather than a hoard and makes her just one character out of many.

So while I cannot unreservedly recommend this book, I think those who like extreme horror will appreciate this book. I also think that rabid zombie fans who must read all zombie books will want to give this a look. I suspect the casual reader may not find this to their liking. For me, I know Duza has other books out there and at least one appears to be a sequel to this book and I intend to check that book out and see if his writing evolved from this effort (and for new readers, I do my best not to know much about authors who are new to me aside from locating their websites to link to them for this blog and I really do my best never to read any one else’s review of a book before I discuss it here). He showed enough raw talent and an eye for an interesting story that bodes well for later efforts.

Tomorrow, I will discuss a book that takes a traditional approach to zombies, and blends it together with plenty of social commentary, literary criticism and the potential frustrations that will come if the only people who survive the zombie apocalypse are vegans. Don’t miss it!

Authors: Edward Lee and Elizabeth Steffen

Type of Book: Fiction, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: I tend to consider books with this level of explicit violence to be odd. Mileage may vary but in my world, discussions of extreme horror end up with the odd books.

Availability: Originally published in 1998, the edition I read was published by Necro Publications in 2003. You can get a copy here:

Comments: This is one of those times when I hate discussing books. I feel full of angst because I adore Edward Lee. Even when he’s off his game a bit, I still think he is one of the most unsung horror writers out there (Jack Ketchum and Christopher Fowler are in that same category – my heart never sinks as much as it does when I mention Lee, Ketchum or Fowler and people have no idea who I am talking about). I just like him.

But this book sucks. It is bad. Bad as in there is so little redeemable about it that all I want to do is downshift into snark mode but feel conflicted because I really like Edward Lee. I sense my inner sauciness will have no choice but to burst forth but before I explain in far too much detail why this book was a grave disappointment, I need to say that I hope Edward Lee never collaborates on a book again. Teratologist, another book for which he was the coauthor, was even worse than this one. Lee is a man who needs to write alone, I think.

On the surface, this book seemed like it was gonna be great. The presence of Ed Lee was part of it but the descriptions also made it seem like it was a winner. A journalist is contacted by a serial killing female in order to tell the killer’s story. The journalist enters a new relationship that challenges her emotionally and before long, the woman, her new lover and the killer are on a collision course, and the journalist and the killer find a horrifying link between themselves. Add a mean cop, lots of violence, and pow, you got yourself a decent enough serial killer book. And to be frank, the killer herself was at times an interesting character, and the violence she wreaks might be, for some extreme horror fans, worth the price of admission.

So… Why does this book stink a’plenty? The reasons are myriad and glaring. First, you will never read a more cliched book outside of a romance novel or a western, or maybe a romance set in the Old West, preferably written by my mom. You’ve got your neurotic heroine who is hot and sexy but at weight lighter than Marilyn Fucking Monroe feels she is obese and ugly. Also she’s wacky and likes to run around naked all the time, as body-loathing headcases are wont to do, amirite? We have a murderous whackjob who is a caricature of every abused female killer, with an endless mental dialogue with her abusive daddy. And despite the fact that she’s a mentally deranged killer, she still somehow manages to dress up, lure, stalk and kill her victims and hold a day job with almost nary a hiccup.

But there’s more, oh so much more. We have the cliche of the hard ass cop bullying his unhappy witness. We have a man who is evidently a poet who is acclaimed enough to have made it into The New Yorker who is capable of writing poetry that would make a teenage goth misery case ashamed at the turgid purpleness of it all. Also, he falls in love with the heroine after a night of sex, because that’s what poets do – they fall in love with weird women involved in murder cases. And in a novel about tracking a serial killer, despite the fact that Elizabeth Steffen is a federal crime analyst, we have characters who use the words psychopath and psychotic interchangeably, descriptions of mental states that read like gibberish and a character who appears to be largely psychotic who is yet still able to write out scholarly analyses of her torture techniques.

Part of me wants to say read this for the nasty parts, that’s clearly why it exists, this book. Read it for all the blood and torture and do your best not to pay attention to the shitty plot, poor characterization and outright insult offered in the details. But I can’t. There is no reason you cannot get a fix for gore without abandoning good prose, tight plot, and believable characters and details. And as I always insist when I pan a book, I don’t want you to take my word for it. Let me support myself with examples from the text.

So let’s get started. Kathleen is an advice columnist who lives alone, and because all women in novels written between 1985 and 2001 were sexually abused, so was Kathleen. She has family money to back her up as she writes her column, is evidently quite curvy and pretty and is ten times more neurotic than I was when I was in college, perpetually drunk and before I discovered the magic of anti-anxiety meds. Anyway, Kathleen has had sex with Platt, the Dogpatch Ted Hughes of this novel, and here’s a glimpse into her mind:

Platt, though not a physical specimen, looked trim and enticing. There’s no way he could ever love a Fattie like me. This impression of herself did not depress her at all, it made her feel proudly objective, not weighing, of course, the hypocrisy. When readers wrote in, fearing rejection due to being overweight, Kathleen reassured them that looks meant nothing in a real relationship. Dump them, she’d advise.

As a woman, reading Kathleen felt like I was trapped in the girl’s room at the junior prom. I can only assume men who read this book endured just for the blood. Yay, another heroine who hates her ass. Yay, Bridget Jones is getting stalked by a killer.

Oh, but you never know, maybe Kathleen really is a lardy troll completely undeserving of human love and should be shunned for her grossness. But luckily we have this information the killer digs up from her car registration after she runs the plates on her car:

HEIGHT: 5-6
WEIGHT: 135

Sigh… Look, I know lots of women have negative body image. I’m a fucking American woman, believe me, I know this. But I don’t want to fucking read about a gorgeous woman bitch about being fat in an extreme horror novel. And it’s all the more annoying to read a character moan and groan about how fat her ass is and then find out she’s probably a size six or less.

Kathleen’s pointless body hate permeates the book like the smell of bacon grease in a roadside diner. Driving with her poet boyfriend, she humorously barks at traffic but also continues on with her tiresome internal dialogue.

Kathleen caught herself examining girls who waited at each crosswalk, and she dismally concluded that almost every single one was better-looking than her. Most were trim Washingtonians in traditional summer yuppie garb. Sandals, shorts, loose, pretty blouses. I’m a dinosaur, she thought. Why can’t I look like those girls?

Yeah, this shit wore thin.

Oh, but wait, Kathleen is also dense and petulant. Her boyfriend, the poet, is napping and is speaking in his sleep:

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara,” he mumbled.
Barbara, huh? Kathleen faintly smirked. So he’s dreaming of old girlfriends. She couldn’t very well hold that against him, though it irked her just the same. You could at least be polite enough to dream about me, Maxwell. That or keep your mouth closed when you’re off in slumberland.

For the love of all that is not shitty, is Kathleen not the more tiresome heroine outside of a haughty lady-in-waiting in some bodice ripper? Not only is she not familiar with one of the most iconic lines in movie history but upon hearing it becomes annoyed that her new man of under a week is not murmuring her name in his sleep. Kathleen, to put it plainly, sucks. When the hapless Maxwell Platt emerges from his sleep she confronts him about this seductress Barbara and when he explains that he is not lying, that he had fallen asleep to Night of the Living Dead, even after she believes him she lacks the grace to apologize.

And then we have this unlikely scene that sealed the deal for me as far as the heroine is concerned. Kathleen is in the shower, and finds herself getting turned on as she remembers the conversation she had with Spence, the adversarial officer assigned to the case:

She remembered what Spence had said, about… What word had he used? Parity, she remembered. Similarities between herself and the killer. The whole thing had been a set-up, but why? The killer was abused as a child, you were abused as a child. So what? Does she look like me? she wondered. Does she have a body like me? A face? Kathleen smiled to herself. Does she touch herself in the shower?

Okay, this is… so full of squick I almost quit reading. Some sexual abuse survivors process their abuse in a sexual manner, that is not unrealistic. But this scene ends with Kathleen bursting from the shower and masturbating on a couch, not even bothering to dry off. She is not processing abuse. She is pondering the similarities between herself and a woman who is so deranged she sent her a man’s severed penis in the mail. Instead of wondering how the other woman ended up a violent killer and contemplating the harm the killer has done, she’s musing about her body and her naked behavior in the shower and using it for masturbatory fodder. On no level does this ring true, it makes the heroine of this book look like a fucking idiot and an asshole and it was foul in every implication. Yeah, Kathleen sucks as a character and that’s problematic because as the heroine of this book, I need to want her to succeed and not get killed in the process and it’s hard to root for someone who is this dense, this self-absorbed, this whiny and this bizarre.

In addition to creating a heroine in whom I have little vested, the authors also run into some problems defining their killer. The title of the book implies the killer is a psychopath but the descriptions of the killer are all over the map and at times read like utter nonsense. Here’s information a forensic psychiatrist gives the lead investigator on the case:

“Tell them to go back a year,” Simmons corrected. “This is something more evolved than your typical unsystematized reality break. Take my word for it, Jeffrey.”

Good thing it isn’t a typical unsystematized reality break because if you Google “unsystematized reality break” you’ll find out it evidently doesn’t exist outside this book. So thank heavens they dodged that “typical” bullet. Steffen, who is a crime analyst, presumably knows her stuff but if so, she is using terminology so arcane that a layman cannot run it to ground. A phrase as weird and awkward as “typical unsystematized reality break” should show up in a Google but it doesn’t and that is problematic. And given how unusual this term is, would it have been too much to have explained it?

The forensic psychiatrist continues:

“She probably lives in a house, in a secluded community,” Simmons continued. “She was sexually abused, probably quite heinously, and probably by her father or or other prominent family figure, from a very young age. She’s obviously bipolar enough to function in public.”

Okay, that first part seems standard enough, but then that last sentence takes it all down a weird road. It’s sort of hard to understand how “bipolar” plays into this in any manner. Bipolar enough to function in public? Well, bipolar people do function in public but it generally is not one of those conditions that one would think helps anyone to function in public. Generally, it is associated with a difficulty in functioning well. Is Steffen trying to convey that the killer is both bipolar and psychotic, or that within her psychosis she is experiencing a swing in behaviors that is similar to the condition of bipolar? I’m not sure and it isn’t explained.

But then, despite the fact that the killer is being presented as psychopathic, terminology gets mixed up, as Spence talks to Kathleen about the killer:

“Most of the conversation she sounded very clear-headed, coherent. Then she goes into the bit about the pain, taking her mother’s pain away and all that.”

“Psychiatrists call it word salad,” Spence enlightened her. “A fairly common trait in bipolar psychosis. One minute she acts and sounds normal, the next minute she’s complete dissociated, completely submerged in her delusions, to such an extreme extent that only she can understand herself.”

Okay, in the course of this book we will find out the killer is bipolar, a psychotic, a psychopath and several other things and I am not a criminal analyst like Steffen but all of this seems unlikely. If it is possible that the killer is a psychopathic psychotic going through some sort of rapidly cycling bipolar spectrum that pushes her from coherence into word salad in the course of one sentence, instead of throwing all this shit out there and expecting us to swallow it, mayhaps the authors could have explained how all these terms fit together and how they manifest together because by failing to do this, it sounds like someone is just tossing out a whole bunch of stuff that sort of sounds officially crazy and hoping we buy it.

It continues:

Simmons’ eyes, in spite of their accrual of years, shined crisply and bright as an infant’s. “But you can take heart in some rather indisputable statistics. The Totem Phase always burns itself out, leaving in its wake a catastrophic amine-related depression. It’s called the Capture Phase. Very quickly the falsehood of the delusion is unveiled; the bipolar mental state reverses poles, so to speak, locking the killer in an inescapable feeling of capture. The psychopath’s self-image is reduced to total meaningless… Suicide is the most frequent result.

This verged on gibberish for me and it’s a bit disorienting when I try to piece ideas together using the Internet and my own library on psychology and criminal profiling and come up empty handed. Would the average person have any goddamned idea what an “amine-related depression” is? Google ain’t gonna be much help. Totem and Capture Phase are not that arcane but coupled in there with amine-related depression and the bad line about the crispness of a baby’s eyes and you sense that this is a novel that really didn’t weigh out the meaning of the words used.

And it goes on and on:

“The killer has to know we’re on to her. But she’s psychopathic. Lotta times psychopaths get fuzzy on the dividing line between fantasy and reality. And they make mistakes. That’s what we’re counting on. She might come here in a fugue state, or when she’s deep in one of her delusions. Then we’ve got her.”

It feels weird countering the words that presumably came from a criminal analyst but yeah, while psychopaths often suffer from delusions, do psychopaths go into a fugue state? That sounds far more like the behavior of a psychotic and the mental state of the killer in this book points far more to a psychotic, someone who has almost no connection to reality. Psychopaths, in my education, were characterized by a superficial glibness and complete inability to care about other people. The killer in this book is full-bore crazed, having a dialogue in her head with her abuser, living a life almost completely detached from reality. It seems to me that despite the presence of an expert as a writer, this book uses the words psychotic and psychopath interchangeably.

But descriptions of the killer are not the only time you will read questionable psychological approaches in this book. Here’s some advice Kathleen received to help her deal with the atrocious abuse she suffered at the hands of her uncle:

“There are times when it’s perfectly healthy to redirect the pain in our lives. To transform it into someone else’s pain.” The method worked very well. Whenever a memory popped up… she simply murdered him in her mind. “Rape-Conclusion Substitution is what we call it.”

Seriously, go Google “Rape-Conclusion Substitution” with one hand and shit in the other and tell me which yields the most search results. Maybe this really is a helpful technique but is used under another name? So why include this at all? This part is not so integral to the plot of the book that the authors needed to create a bullshit label for this therapeutic technique or use a technique so arcane and obscure that it is impossible for a layperson to find out about it.

There are some seriously wacky plot devices in this book as well. At one point, Spence knows that they have a line on the killer and the powers that be, called General Command, see fit to send a helicopter to land on the lawn of Spence’s condo complex to pick him up in the middle of the night so he can be on the scene when they catch the killer. At least the authors have the decency to admit this whole scene is dumb:

The neighbors’ll love me, he thought, and then stepped out into what had to be the most ludicrous scenario of his life… The helicopter–a rebuilt white Bell JetRanger–descended amid the chugging cacophony of its props, and a mad wind siphoned about Spence, which nearly sucked his unbuttoned Christian Dior off his back.

Yeah, no sending a car for Spence. Nope, let’s risk the lives of untold people landing a fucking enormous helicopter on the grounds of a heavily populated area. C’mon, this is a serial killer/police procedural/heavy gore book. We don’t need plots lines from post-Cold War spy novel wet dreams.

Some of the dialogue was miserable. Just miserable. Take this example. Spence the detective has come to Kathleen’s door:

“Hello,” he said when she opened up.
“Damn. I was hoping it was the Fuller Brush Man.”
“The Fuller Brush Man isn’t your ticket to literary acclaim.”
“Oh, but you are?” she said. “A poker-faced cop in a bargain basement suit?”
Spence’s gaze distended. “This suit cost $850. It’s made from some of the finest–”
“Relax Kafka, I was only kidding. Are you here for anything in particular, or just the typical police harassment?”

1) No one under the age of 60 uses the Fuller Brush Man as a reference in actual conversation, even those of us who watch a lot of old television and read potboilers from the ’40s.
2) How the fuck does someone’s gaze distend?
3) Kafka? Kafka? Maybe there was a reference earlier in the book that explains this because if there isn’t (and I don’t think there is) calling Spence Kafka makes no fucking sense.

Then there’s just the bad writing. This may seem picky but if the rest of the book is a clusterfuck, it becomes hard to overlook even little problems. Like this line of dialogue from a scene in the morgue wherein an evidence tech explains things in language we can all understand.

“Three bodies,” he said. “We’ll call them One, Two, and Three.”

Well, thank God that wasn’t… so obvious that it approached pointlessness. Glad we got that cleared up.

Bad writing continues apace. Like this gem a murder victim overheard in a bathroom in a goth club that he entered because, as we all know, goth clubs are the best sort of meat markets for norm guys on the make:

In the bathroom some guys were doing cocaine as they traded jokes. “What’s the difference between Michael Jackson and potato chips? Michael Jackson comes in a can.”

Does anyone even know what this joke means? I mean, aside from the fact that it seems unlikely that such a joke would be common fare, it’s almost as cryptic as the discussion of “amine-related depression.”

While in the goth club, which we know is goth because the future victim thinks one girl looks like Morticia Adams (sic) and because there is Joy Division graffiti written in the bathrooms, we are presented with the victim’s take on the costuming around him:

Brad spotted some class cleavage, a brunette in sequins and earrings that looked like shower curtain rings.

Yeah, goth girls in sequins and enormous hoop earrings were thick on the ground in the late 1990s. Thick, I tell you. You also had to look out for all the feather boas and girls in crinoline looking like Cyndi Lauper. Eh, given that no one noticed they were misspelling the Addams family name, I am probably kicking a poorly dyed horse.

Moving on to weird and heavy-handed descriptives. Take this scene, the quotes taking place within paragraphs of each other:

He wondered what he’d done to her–some obsidian inquisitor in him with no heart.

Followed by:

It all poured out of her–the blackest ichor tapped through the wounds her uncle had lain into her spirit.

Okay, I get that the authors want to imply darkness, a blackness that implies the horrible evil that happened to Kathleen at the hands of her uncle. But why an obsidian inquisitor? A shiny, striated, glossy, brittle inquisitor? Blackest ichor? Blackest blood of the gods? I mean, these words all sound sort of good but mostly these words mean very little in conveying what I assume the authors wanted to make us aware of.

Word misuse does not end there:

Moonlight bathed the room in lucent slants, just like the dream. She lay naked in an ichor of sweat…

An ichor of sweat, eh? What the hell does that even mean? She laid in a blood of the gods of sweat? Or maybe a fluid of inflammation of sweat? And again, Kathleen’s tendency to love being naked in hot rooms feels a wee bit gratuitous.

But we aren’t done with black and blood imagery.

The words seemed to permute the paper until they were no longer words at all, but glyphic scrawlings etched in black blood.

Ignoring the fact that paper cannot be etched, I have no fucking idea what a glyphic scrawling is in this usage since we have no fucking idea what the paper was permuted into. I also wonder about using “permute” because as far as I know, it is a verb used mainly in math, implying order. If the words had been permuted, I could understand that because it would imply the order of the words was being changed. But can a page of paper be permuted? It could be mutated, I guess, but permute was not a good word choice for this sentence. In fact, this sentence can’t stand up to the most basic parsing without verging into gibberish. At several places in this book, it seemed like words were selected for how they might sound rather than what they actually mean.

Continuing on with bad writing choices, there was this bizarre statement:

“Jesus to Pete, Lieutenant. You got yourself a real winner here. This chick knows more about torture than Einstein knew about relativity. Makes Adolf Eichmann look like fuckin’ Dick Van Dyke.”

This sort of hyperbole doesn’t really give definition to the killer by emphasizing how horrific are her actions but rather gives a sense that Eichmann was somehow not all that bad, you know, given that some lady somewhere did really bad stuff to some men. Yes, this serial killer is terrible. She binds men up like mummies so that they cannot move and then does things like blow red pepper up their noses and cuts off their penises. She’s deranged and does vile things. But is she really a rival of one of history’s greatest monsters? Why include a statement like this at all because if one doesn’t immediately laugh, which I guess was the response the authors wanted, the only other thing to do is to look at the statement and realize how bad an idea it is to consider the actions of a serial killer in reference to one of history’s worst genocides. I know this book is over a decade old but even given the round of razzing people receive online when they invoke Nazis in bad arguments, the custom still persists in fiction. It’s annoying and unless one is writing about Nazis, one should not invoke them to make specious comparisons.

There were other issues with the book. A radio shrink telling a caller with sexual issues who was molested by her brother to kill him in with her mind several times a day, a therapy that may be just dandy but seems a terrible thing to be advocating over the radio, an idea that could easily become a murder charge outside of a therapeutic setting. The scene where Kathleen is symbolically confronting her abuser while being molested by a snake was so heavy-handed and dripping in false symbolism that it was a car wreck. Oh, then there was what I have no choice but to call the “butt spit” scene.

Sigh…

The killer walks in on people having furtive sex in the hospital where she works:

She knew the phlebotomy tech was sodomizing her because every few minutes the nurse would whisper, “More spit,” and the phlebotomy tech would stop and his head would tilt and she could hear him expectorate, and then he’d start again.

Somehow that was the foulest scene in the book. Seriously, a head nurse bent over and buttfucked and nowhere in the hospital is there a better lube than some guy’s spit? I mean, the only other place where there would have been more lube options available would have been a lube factory. Just because they spit all over each other in porn does not mean anyone else does it in real life. Use lube appropriate to the sex act. The anal fissures you won’t get later will thank you for it. And if you do so, you might be less inclined to describe anal sex in a manner that sounds like the second take for a shoe string porn script. But if this was meant to be just gross, the authors succeeded well.

Interestingly, in a book where two of the main characters are writers, neither seemed to be able to write worth a damn. Spence, the detective, reads one of Kathleen’s columns and rhetorically asks himself if it is just him or if none of it makes a lick of sense, like it was written in a foreign language. Here’s the column answer he read:

Regarding your former boyfriend, forget him. By saying such spiteful things to you he’s only elucidating his own selfishness and immaturity, not to mention his lack of consideration for your honest feelings. Men like that are best left out with the garbage. And as for your current emotional perplexion, I think you need to reverse your methods of anticipation. …

No, Spence, it’s not just you. I know the authors were trying to make an “Aren’t men and women different” statement, plus a little, “Hey, gay men don’t get women,” sort of riff but it mostly read like nonsense.

And Kathleen isn’t the only shitty writer in this hot mess. Remember her boyfriend, the poet? The one so good he’s in The New Yorker? This is a poem of his Kathleen finds. Also note that he calls every poem he writes “Exit” for reasons I am sure are too deep and poetical for the likes of me:

EXIT by Maxwell Platt
Resplendence is truth, yet it’s escaped me somehow,
And I don’t even remember what you look like now.
But in the trees, in the clouds, in the heavens above
even the angels are burning up with all my love.

Well, it’s not Tennyson. It’s not even Cummings or Plath. It’s barely a Nickelback lyric.

There is another poem, the only one not called “Exit” but is instead called “A Keatsian Inquiry.” Here’s a snippet:

Dare he wake her beauty in the moon?
For what he spied–such love–and in
that precious moment didst nearly swoon.
Yet on she slept a lovely sleep;
here is the image his love doth reap.

Could no one have looked up an actual poem by Keats or a modern love poem and at least tried to ape it a bit? Because asking us to accept this as anything but the work of an overwrought high school freshman is a bit much.

So. What have we in total? We have a spunky but self-loathing hot chick who thinks she’s fat and writes a shitty self-help column that brought her to the attention of a psychotic, psychopathic, bipolar killer who slips into word salad and sends the columnist dicks in the mail. We have a detective who largely does not grate, but we also have a poet who cannot write poetry. We have words that don’t fit together well. We have scenes so utterly dumb they would make a normal person curse their dog when they read them. Bad analogies. A girl killer worse than Eichmann. Butt sex with spit.

We also have some top notch, methodical and yet over the top extreme violence. So weigh things out. Can you take all that I laid out and so much more in order to get to the heinous parts? If not, may I recommend Edward Lee’s Infernal books. Some pretty foul content, extreme horror, and though these books likely have all kinds of issues, the content is lively, engaging, disgusting and funny enough that I didn’t really notice. And with so much extreme horror, that’s the goal, to be so wrapped up in the content that the meta of the reading experience doesn’t intrude. This book didn’t come close to achieving that goal.

Author: Various, edited by Cheryl Mullenax

Type of Book: Extreme horror, short story collection, fiction

Why I Considered This Book Odd: My arbitrary criteria tells me that I need to review and discuss extreme horror over here. And extreme horror does often fall under the auspices of what is odd because true foulness is often very weird.

Availability: Published by Comet Press in 2009, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I don’t know. Extreme horror just isn’t that extreme for me anymore except in what seems like the pervasive poverty of concept. I’m unsure if I’ve just read so much real extreme horror, meaning nastiness with a real plot and real characterization, and splatter, which makes no pretense about being simply an attempt to gross-out, that it takes a lot to move me. Perhaps I just lucked out in the beginning of my literary life and read good horror, good extreme horror and now little measures up. I mean, you have writers out there like Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee, who write hard content in the course of telling one mean story. The horrific content happens because the tale itself is horrific but you get a plot, you get characters you give a damn about, you get a tight story that draws you in even as it appalls you. Then you have collections like Excitable Boys that are meant to be grotesque and nothing else and present no pretense otherwise. And then you have collections like this, wherein the stories which were meant to be actual stories were poorly written vehicles in which to deliver a gross-out, and not very gross gross-outs at that.

I know, I know, some are going to be tempted to say, “Look, Sugarpants, you just don’t get extreme horror. It’s not meant to be good fiction.” To which I say, “Feh.” Too many writers manage to get it right, marrying excellent story-telling and fabulous gore, for this argument to hold water. Accepting the mediocre because it is gross demeans the whole genre. This collection was neither good stories with extreme content nor a straightforward nausea-fest and as neither fish nor foul, it occupies an uneasy nether land, all the more uneasy because the stories were so… nothing. Nothing to them. It never bodes well when after reading a collection of short stories, I find myself rereading the whole thing because I can’t remember it. Sometimes you need a refresher when you want to discuss a story. You can jog your memory by reading a few lines. Not here. I had to reread entire chunks of many of these stories to recall what they were about, so unimpressive were they as a lot. A few were decent, three were quite good, but the rest were terrible and one so bad I could not get past the first few paragraphs.

It is not too much to ask that a story decide what it wants to be. Be a good tale with nastiness or nothing but nastiness but don’t waste the reader’s time with poorly constructed drek passed off as characterization and plot so you can include some cannibalism or butt-related content. Write something a person can remember after reading it, dammit.

“The Fisherman” by Brian Rosenberger was a middling story. A fisherman discovers the real reasons his rival manages to catch so many fish. It was entertaining enough, there was some gore and some might find it extreme, but largely the story was not inventive or interesting enough to really feel strongly about it. Also, I am unsure why I find the “bad man assumes the habits of worse man in a sort of gotcha ending” trope so tiresome, but I do.

Randy Chandler’s “Fungoid” wasn’t too bad, actually. Sort of foul, somewhat interesting, I didn’t feel cheated at the end and in a collection this mediocre, you take what you can get. A man down on his luck cleaning homes in a doomed neighborhood finds himself victim of a natural horror. There’s something old school about this story that I have a hard time putting my finger on. It has a sort of 1950s horror mag feel about it that made me nostalgic for the time when I first discovered Stephen King (and maybe it reminded me a little of poor Jordy Verrill).

“Tenant’s Rights” by Sean Logan was a story about a demented roommate whose egoist roommate is edging him out of his rented room, and how he does his best to sabotage the attempt. The characters were caricatures – slimy boyfriend, crazy roommate, senile grandparents, dopey girlfriend. This story was not particularly clever, and the gross-out was not worth reading through what one has to read to get to it. The lack of subtlety in this one was stark. Itch powder in the crotch goes horribly wrong. Sigh…

Ramsey Campbell’s “Again” was one of three highlights in the book. A creepy, demented woman lures a helpful man into a situation he almost cannot get out of, a vague description but since this story was quite good, I don’t want to give away the essential plot. Unlike some of the other stories where crotches dissolve and women have things shoved up their vaginas, this story was genuinely uncomfortable. Campbell set a scene that made my skin crawl in a story that blended the grotesque and the gross and wove it into a gripping narrative. As I read the story, I almost hoped it would not be as well-crafted as it was because it is almost a ringer to love Campbell in this collection. But the man is a pro and a well-loved pro for a reason.

Tim Curran’s “Maggots” was the second shining star in this collection. Again, the difference boils down into merging the horrific details with a fine story, setting scene and creating characters as opposed to slinging words around some foul scenarios and calling it a story. A French soldier survives Napoleon’s failed invasion in Russia via cannibalism and picks up an obsession he cannot shake. This is one of the best stories involving a realistic ghoul that I have ever read. The mental anguish the protagonist experiences, the visceral nature of his obsession – it was a perfect marriage of extreme horror and fine writing.

Stefan Pearson’s story, “Going Green” missed the mark. A loathsome man creates “green” energy using the undead. The story was okay, but it was predictable, a cat gets killed (a completely personal note, but animal death in a story has to be really justified for me or I get annoyed and we already knew the protagonist in this piece was a complete bag o’ shite before the cat killing), the smell of human rot is a punchline (lol dead woman with so many air fresheners around her neck she looks like Mr. T – I actually groaned when I read that line) and the protagonist was utterly one-dimensional.

“Coquettrice” by Angel Leigh McCoy… I can’t even tell you my opinion because this story resonated with me so poorly that to remember any of it would have required a complete, word for word, second reading. Skimming through it, it was as if I had never before read it. And I refuse to read it a second time. It could be amazing and I blanked (which seldom happens when I read anything amazing but never say never), or it could be an enormous waste of time. I can’t tell you. I simply don’t remember and do not want to invest any more time.

“The Fear in the Waiting” by C.J. Henderson was another that did not have the power after a three week respite to cause me to recall much more than it was a Lovecraft homage. Again, could have been great, could have been terrible – I simply do not remember and skimming does not jog my memory. I suspect that having zero memory of something after you read it when you are known as a relatively careful reader is a clue.

“The Worm” by John Bruni was the best of the midding stories, approaching quite good. The content is horrific, but none of it matches the sheer horror of being in one’s 30s and living with one’s alcoholic mother. The incestuous part of the story was… nauseating? Grotesque? Call it what you want but the characterization and use of the taboo gave this story real tension. The foulness was just a nice bonus.

“Sepsis” by Graham Masterson was not too bad, either. Again with the dead cats, but this one was a little easier on my cat-woman psyche. A man and a woman become so enmeshed with one another that they find a way to remain together forever. I think this one suffered a bit from too much story – had some of the story outside the two lovers been trimmed down (the attempted intervention by the coach comes to mind), this story would have benefited, but given the company this story keeps, that’s a minor criticism indeed. The gore was extreme, especially at the end, but there was enough unsettling action – the way the lovers interact – that this story could stand alone without the gore, but Masterson used such details deftly.

“What You Wish For” by Garry Bushell was predictable. Nasty harridan who hits upon a gold mine gets hoist by her own petard. The only thing extreme about this story was how predictable it is. It wasn’t a fabulous story and the gore was restrained – nothing to be ashamed of, but nothing to write home about either.

“The Devil Lives in New Jersey” by C.F. Kilgore also mined a predictable trope – police chief down on his luck moves to a small town only to find the case that haunted him moved with him. This story set my teeth on edge for a number of reasons. First, it suffered from the syndrome that plagues many secondary Stephen King characters. King is one of the finest writers today, genre be damned, but some of the dialogue and characteristics he gives to women grate. Kilgore’s teen girl giggles, she uses the word “Sweetie” when addressing her boyfriend, she gags when she is confronted by merely the idea of something gross, she gets sexually demeaned (evidently she swallows a lot of semen and her boyfriend feels okay bringing this up in the middle of raising the devil, as you do) and of course, she ends up dead with foreign objects shoved up her vagina. Then there is the whole topic of Satanism. It feels like this was written in 1985 because the story reads like a Satanic Panic description of devil worship. Because the protagonist is an expert on Satanism, when his son decides he wants to go to a supposed gateway to Hell, he pilfers a book from his father’s collection and has in a bag black candles, chalices, a small sword – you know, all the things that you’d expect to see in a Hammer movie. It annoys me that this story annoyed me so much (yeah, that’s a mangled sentence) because the story itself was interesting once you got past the initial predictability. The depth of the gore was balanced by a pretty decent story that only kicks in about half-way through. Overall, the piece suffered from its flaws too much to be a good story.

“Rat King” by Jeffrey King continued in the trend of mining predictable veins: Concentration camp guard gets what is coming to him with bonus homosexuality, which seems to be the trend whenever Nazis are used in fiction. But overall, this story was entertaining and while the horror of it didn’t really work out on paper for me, this is not a math equation and if you can look at the human rat king in the story with the spirit intended, it is pretty disgusting and repellent. But the pathos needed for me to give a crap about any of the characters was missing.

“The Caterpillar” by C. Dennis Moore was another of the top stories in this collection. It’s a tale of supernatural body horror that still remains grounded enough for the reader to experience the horror in a visceral manner. The characterization was top notch and the plot had an emotional level in it that is often missing in horror stories. I was unfamiliar with Moore until I read this story and intend to visit his site to see what else he has out there to read.

“‘Poor Brother Ed’ or The Man Who Visited” by Ralph Greco, Jr is the story I quit reading on the second page. I’m unsure if I had fatigue from the entire collection, or if it was the fact that five, possibly six characters were tossed at me casually in the first ten paragraphs. I twice tried to make myself read it but the onslaught of countrified characters made me stop both times. I can stomach such tactics in novels because I know I will be able to sort it out as the novel unfolds, but that is not a luxury one has in a short story. When I am reading and realize that even though the character is called Ed in the title but is Joshua in the story and I am having difficulty knowing if Mama Lee and Mama Bell are the same person, it’s time to throw in the towel.

So here you are: Three good stories, four decent enough, two stories so unremarkable I cannot recall them three weeks out, five stories that were overall not very good, and one so bad I could not even finish it. This is not a collection I would recommend, though as I said, I definitely plan to see what else C. Dennis Moore has to say. The only reason I don’t wholly regret reading this collection is because I sense a very good writer has now come across my radar.

Author: Wrath James White

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, extreme horror

Why I Consider This Book Odd: This book is not odd in the way many of the quirky, weird, off-beat and off-kilter books I review here often are. This book is only odd in that it is of an extreme, and that extreme is horror. This ain’t a book for the squeamish and the extremity of the content is what I think makes it fodder for my odd mill.

Availability: Published by Two Backed Books in 2005, it appears not to be in print any more since the imprint itself is no longer in business. You can, however, still score a copy on Amazon if you don’t mind paying at least twice cover price:

Comments: Wrath James White interests me on a personal level. Admittedly, all I know of him is what he puts online about himself and what he reveals about himself in interviews. He is someone I can see sharing a beer with, and talking religion and philosophy into the wee morning hours. He’s an interesting man with an unusual life arc and based on what I had seen of him and what others writers say about him, I bought blind three of his books. Not unusual for me. Before Richard Laymon died, I knew nothing about him but bought five of his paperbacks I stumbled across in a used bookstore based solely on the covers. I am a bibliophile and the -phile part makes me take chances on the unknown.

So, I had three White books, and one was his collaboration with one of my favorite horror writers, Edward Lee. The book, Teratologist, was possibly the most disappointing book I read in 2008, and I paid an arm and a leg online to get a signed, hardcover copy. I had not read a single review of it when I bought it and likely would have bought it even had I read a few but even so, I did not enjoy it. The book couldn’t even keep the names of the characters straight, sometimes getting the names wrong, as well as misspelling them (“Michael” frequently became “Micheal,” sometimes in the same page). I am a picky reader – every book on the planet has a couple of errors, and I am that snotty reader who generally notices them – but the grammar, spelling and punctuation in Teratologist were egregious to the point of distraction. Problematically, the topic was also a miss for me, a contrived and unlikely attempt to force a confrontation with God via the creation of human monsters using a vile drug that mutates the human sex drive. The grandiose and philosophically questionable nature compelling the book’s plot put me off. I bought my White books in 2008 and after reading Teratologist, I put the others away. I recently discovered them in the back of my nightstand cupboard, pulled them out and decided to give it a go. The Book of a Thousand Sins was strike two.

I always feel odd giving bad reviews on fiction, even when I emphatically think a book is not good. It is one thing for me to pull apart non-fiction books on conspiracy theory and new-age nonsense that asserts the soul of Einstein is on the planet Marduk. It is another to find fault in fiction because all fiction comes from a place of inner experience and not to like fiction is, in a sense, finding fault with the author him or herself, even if that is probably not the best way to look at things.

There were three overarching problems I had with The Book of a Thousand Sins, and they are:

1) The stories all had a common theme, not unexpected to be sure, but themes that became a bit repetitive and seemed unoriginal once you had a couple of stories under your belt. The themes are that there is no God and life is suffering and pain, or that there is a God and/or Hell, both are out to get you and life is suffering and pain. In one story, White’s riff on these themes was amazing, and I will get to that in a moment, but overall, the approach at times seemed heavy-handed and repetitive.

2) There is a passivity in reading White that is alienating. Too much of the plot in some of the stories comes from dialogue, or in some cases, monologue. I am not one to tell anyone to show and not tell, because it is a cheap criticism, all too often used when people just don’t like a book and need something to base that dislike on. This was not the case with White’s stories, when much of the plot came from dialogue. This was especially difficult because when White writes in a realm of action, his prose is quite good.

3) When you combine White’s tendency to tell the story via dialogue with White’s themes, you can also end up feeling preached at, an uncomfortable feeling when reading. I often found myself mentally blipping over large chunks of the dialogue when this preachy sense crept up on me. There is a didactic nature to some of the speeches that makes White’s exciting concepts boring.

I won’t discuss all the stories, but in my typical manner of review, I will begin with the bad and end with the good.

The story I had the most problems with, flat out, was “A Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man.” The problems were varied, but the three main problems I had with this collection plagued this piece. That there is no real life after death and that life is suffering is the theme, as is revenge, but I don’t want to spoil the story by discussing that in length. Much of the story is told via the priest expounding about his philosophical views on life and death. About half the story is simply the priest going on at length. The preachiness was heavy in this story.

But this story was plagued by other issues. For any reader with basic knowledge of Islam, White telegraphed the ending in the first paragraph. I knew roughly how it was going to end two lines in. In horror, as in all writing, there is nothing new under the sun but this story did seem very transparent to me. I also wondered about some of the details. A priest is having a coherent conversation with a man who had been recently trached. Okay, unlikely a person with a trach tube could talk that easily but it could happen, as the vocal chords still work. But combine that trach tube with terminal third degree burns and an oxygen tent, the patient would have been too doped up to be able to speak or in such agonizing pain that a coherent back and forth would have been impossible. Additionally, the MPs guarding the dying man would never have let a man, even a military priest, carry a parcel of bloody meat into a patient’s room. My own military man in residence confirmed this very unrealistic plot point. So the story was factually a bit off, preachy, long-winded at times and consisted mostly of dialogue that revealed the plot. I admit it is hard to have much action in a hospital room, but there are ways of structuring plot to avoid issues like this. This story just was overwhelmed by too many parts that did not work well.

“Awake” was a tale told almost entirely through dialogue, and this one, while taking place in a prison cell, could easily have unfolded without the story being told via one character delivering a monologue of the action. Again, it questioned the nature of Godhead, and it seemed bizarre to me that when a man realizes that he has achieved a personal level of deification, the response to this is to violently run amok. This is horror, and extreme horror at that. Running amok is perfectly acceptable here. Hell, even encouraged. But the cause and effect seemed off to me.

The story from which the title of the book is derived, “The Book of a Thousand Sins” wore thin for me. Again, we see the theme of Hell and man’s interaction with the physical and metaphysical world being nothing but pain, but this time, those who are in pain enjoy it. I think this story I just chalked up to me not getting, or simply not liking, but even when one does not like a story, I don’t think it is fair to sniff, “Well, it just wasn’t for me!” I disliked this story because for me the characters made no sense. A master-servant relationship becomes marred when the man, called Lord, cannot be the bottom to the woman, Anja, in a switch relationship. Anja stumbles across a legendary rare book that explains how one can sin one’s way into leadership in Hell, and I suspect that it harked back too much to Teratologist for me to wholly like it. But I never understood how the sexual failure between the pair sparked such hatred on Anja’s part. Her loathing for Lord and desire to punish him made no sense to me, but I suspect I was expecting more sanity than the characters possessed. Anja was unhinged, it just never was clear to me why.

Some of White’s prose is slightly baroque, but this story veered into near-purple on several occasions. Lord, a very tall, very well-built black man is so handsome all sexes fawn over him, want to have sex with him and serve him, and find his cruelty so exquisite they are willing to die at his hands. That the physical appearance of Lord and White seems so similar left me with an uneasy feeling, though nothing that White reveals online comes close to resembling the megalomaniac Lord. Still, it was not unlike if I wrote a story about a short, pudgy woman with too many cats and how she achieved global domination via her cookie-making charms.

Still, I think it was the excessive prose that really hammered me on this one. Take this passage:

Lord shouldered his way through the crowd, ignoring the leering stares and not-too-subtle come-ons from the made-up masochists that were drawn to the furious heat of his passion, which blazed like a sun in this dark pit where everyone else seemed only slightly more passionate than the average married couple. They drooled over his powerful musculature, imagining the intense agony and fathomless pleasure such a body would be capable of meting out. Other doms looked upon him with envy and some dared to imagine what it would be like to top such a man. Lord looked upon them all with a disdainful sneer, meeting their eyes until each one bowed their heads and looked away, subs and doms alike. To call Lord a dominant was like calling a tsunami a wave. He was so much more than that.

There are elements of the above paragraph that would be more at home in a Black Lace novel. There are elements that would be a perfect description of every distant but haughty male in romance novels. The prose was just too… too much, I guess.

“Couch Potato” was a story that had too much dialogue propelling the action as well, but this one was hit and miss. The mental degeneration that the protagonist suffers at the end due to excessive television consumption was both horrific and hilarious, a difficult combination that White managed quite well. It was just hampered by half the story being conversation, some of it stiff. Again, the narrative could have been far better propelled by just telling the protagonist’s story, not engaging in so much dialogue.

“Don’t Scream” had the element of Hell being out to get you, but this tale fared far better than some of the others with similar themes. My only quarrel is that White’s plots sometimes have twists, elements that derail the power of the narrative. This one was active, visceral, disgusting and horrifying, and that the protagonist is in Hell is understood without the TWIST ending spelling it out. It made me wonder what the hell Hell really is in the context to where a man is in literal Hell but still goes to the emergency room and gets canned from work. Still, overall, this story’s whole beat out the flawed parts.

“A Friend in Need” needed to stop about three paragraphs sooner than it did. A nasty, fun piece about a werewolf on the run in the ‘hood, getting help from an old friend, was one of the stronger pieces until the very end, when, in my opinion, the friend, who was degenerate and debauched in a manner all his own, does something that does not seem in keeping with his character. He was suspicious of his werewolf friend and appalled by the whole scenario. That he ultimately does what he does seemed odd to me. He was a criminal badass all his own and did not need to take the steps he did. I just didn’t get it. At times, I wondered if my failure to connect with White’s characters was to blame for my lack of enthusiasm, but then I would connect with some and sensed that perhaps the problem did not lie entirely with my perception.

“Fly” was another story that the ending, for most readers of horror, was sort of clear from halfway through, but ultimately, this story was fun, a demented, serial killer tit for tat. The narrative was active and the ending, while predictable, was predictable in a way that in no way distracted from the whole of the piece.

Now for the stories I don’t have criticism for or damn with faint praise.

“Resurrection Day,” was a multi-layered tale of the dead come back to life, but this is no run-of-the-mill zombie tale. Told in a style where the action unfolds organically and not through conversation, it was a gripping story. And because White kept in check his tendency to let characters expound at length on his clear areas of interest, the moral impact of the piece is a fist in the gut, an exploration of what it means to be human, and what it means for life to have meaning because it must end at some point. I did not see the end coming but it made perfect sense and reading this story was a pleasure.

“My Very Own” also unfolds organically, a lonely, sad man revealing what he is willing to do to never be alone again. Part Dahmer-esque serial killer, part lost child seeking love, this story creates sympathy for the devil. I halfway hoped the protagonist would succeed in his ghastly quest.

The best tale in the collection was “Munchausen by Proxy.” In this piece, all of White’s bailiwicks are at work – God exists and is out to get us and life is suffering and pain, but it is done so cleverly, with so much thought, that the realization of what is happening does not occur to the reader until White reveals his hand. The active prose, telling the story of a woman who is much more than a woman who toys with her sick, dying children, giving some life, making some horribly ill, arbitrarily making decisions that will cause grave suffering, was profound. It was dark, horrible and fascinating.

White, when he controls his dialogue, reveals plot through action, and balances his themes, can write a mean, nasty, disgusting, gripping story. He can make you think and gross you out at the same time, but even when that doesn’t happen, when he is restrained, it keeps you turning the page because even when a story is not wholly new in concept, if it is well-written, it’s hard to find it derivative. And when I mean restrained, I mean keeping certain tendencies under control. He in no way needs to restrain any of the elements that make him an extreme horror writer. His foulness is on point. No quarrel with his tendencies to push that particular envelope because he knows when to do it and how to do it well.

I have a copy of Succulent Prey remaining to be read, I think, and despite my less than satisfactory experiences with two Wrath James White books, I will eventually read it. I’ve read his short stories, I’ve read his collaboration with another writer, and both left me flat. But like food critics visit a restaurant more than once to get the real gist of what the place is like, I feel like I need to read White’s solo, long-form fiction in order to see if I just caught him in two formats that did not suit him as well.