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Book Review: Welcome to the Splatter Club, Vol. 2 edited by K. Trap Jones

Welcome to the Splatter Club, Vol. 2, by various authors, edited by K. Trap Jones

 

Blood Bound Publishing, 2021

 

ISBN: 9781718170278

 

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com)

 

If you are tired of the “same old, same old” with horror stories and are craving something original,  Welcome to the Splatter Club vol.2 is your passport to madness and mayhem of the highest order.  Want a good dose of blood and pain, such as someone getting their balls smashed with a hammer?  You got it.  How about really weird erotica, straight out of freaky-deaky sex land?  It’s in here.  Best of all, if you want truly original stories that are so off the wall they make mind-bending substances seem like a good idea, then you need this book.  It’s the best, wildest collection I’ve come across in a couple of years.  Kudos to editor K. Trap Jones: he clearly knows how to pick ’em.

 

The overall story quality is exceptionally strong: there’s only one dud out of thirteen stories.  The rest graded an average of B+/A-, with one C+ and five solid A’s.  About the only unifying themes are taking an ordinary situation and making it beyond strange, and there are a few revenge stories of sorts.  

 

In “War of the Wildflowers”,  two apartment neighbors are squabbling.  Sounds standard, but one of them has a fishbowl for a head, and the two fish inside provide eyesight for the human. The story has real sadness built into it, and is the closest you get to a tearjerker in the book.  

In “The Sack Cutter”,  a young lady has the guy who used her and tossed her aside captive in a deserted cabin.  Contrary to the story title, this is NOT the usual “physical torture for revenge” plot.  The lady has a much more clever and less physically painful idea in mind to make him pay.  The story also does a nice job blurring the lines between vengeance and a desire to help improve people.

 

Take the opening scene from the movie Natural Born Killers, and substitute in crazed vegetarians who want to make a statement and get their 15 minutes of fame, and you have the basic story of “Hell Comes to Burger Hut”,  a cautionary tale about how far people will stoop to become social media darlings.

 

“Igloo Made of Flesh” is possibly the strangest two pages ever written.  A city apartment with an Eskimo who grinds up people to make igloo blocks?  Yes, you read that correctly.

 

In “The Long Winter Ahead”, two buddies on a cross-country trip run into the world’s weirdest cult in a hicktown bar.  How many stories feature guys having forced sex with trees animated by spirits?  This is a very unusual take on the Gaia mythos.

 

If that isn’t enough, there are also lycanthropes, undead pizza parlor owners, and flesh-chomping gators hopped up on meth.  Need I say more?  Bottom line: for horror fans, this collection is a can’t miss.

 

 Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

Posted on June 14, 2022 by , 1 comment

Book Review: The Bone Cutters by Renee S. DeCamillis

The Bone Cutters by Renee S. DeCamillis

Eraserhead Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1621052937

Available: Paperback

 

This has been a banner year for introducing stellar new horror writers to the world. Renee S. DeCamillis shows she is one of these with  her novella The Bone Cutters, one of the strangest, but coolest, entries of 2019. Fans of Gwendolyn Kiste or Cody Goodfellow will definitely want to seek this out.

The novella is a wonderful form for horror, giving the reader and author just enough time to grow into the story, fall for the characters, and then leave both with a scar on the soul. DeCamillis’ story touches on elements of the familiar, but makes it her own.

Dory, the main character, wakes up in a mental ward with no idea how she got there, but learns she has been “blue-papered”– committed without consent. In other hands than DeCamillis’, this could have turned out to be just another horror tale in a tired setting, but the story takes a hard left when Dory attends her first group meeting. The people in the group have strange scars signaling that they are  addicts of a new kind. These people are “dusters,” the titular “bone cutters”. who carve into their own– or others’ — bodies, to get high off the dust within. They dig and scrape until they procure enough of the material from the bones to give themselves  a high unknown to other addicts. Because Dory is a “freshie”– a newbie who hasn’t been dusted yet– she becomes their prime target. Dory has nobody to help her until she meets the enigmatic custodian, Tommy, whose past may tie into the patients from whom Dory is trying to escape.

To say more about the plot would give away too much. Just dive in and enjoy.

DeCamillis doesn’t mess around with frills here. Her writing is as razor sharp as the cutting tools the patients use. Not a word is wasted in this lean tale that grabs hold from the get go, and drags the reader through a surreal experience that evokes One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, if written by Clive Barker. The ending arrives way too fast, but it will leave readers jonesing for another hit of this new writer.

A recommended novella to be added to a fine 2019.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

 

Posted on September 13, 2019 by , 1 comment

Book Review: The Night’s Neon Fangs by David W. Barbee

The Night’s Neon Fangs by David W. Barbee

Eraserhead Press, 2015

Available: New Paperback

ISBN: 9781621051756

 

The Night’s Neon Fangs is a collection of four novellas of horror/weird fiction. Barbee writes beautifully, telling emotional stories and drawing sympathy for the protagonist from readers. The titular novella is about Buster Wade, an electric werewolf who works as a bodyguard and general muscle for a company that cleans up after mummy storms in the future. A giant and dangerous cloud of mummies began in the wake of a disastrous gathering of international gods, and roams the country dumping thousands of pounds of mummies onto the public below. I loved this story for the simple fact that it has mummies, something that you don’t typically see too much of in horror fiction.

Noah’s Arkopolis is about a weird amalgam of a city, built up over time, after God left Noah and the animals adrift with no land in sight. Mating over the generations created many new species of animal/human hybrids. The city is now in danger of being destroyed by whales, so Noah’s ghost enlists the help of Gren, an average citizen of Arkopolis to save the city. This is one of the most imaginative stories I’ve ever read and I loved it. Gren is a sympathetic character, while I wanted to strangle Noah’s ghost at times.

That Ultimo Sumbitch is a surreal, steampunk, sort of story. Ultimo, a mechanized soldier who thinks he is human, is roaming what is left of the Australian outback, in the wake of an alien invasion of Earth. This story just about brought tears to my eyes. Although the main character isn’t even human, the story is gritty and emotionally charged.

Finally, Batcop Out of Hell tells the story of McNulty, a batcop in Guano City who is murdered along with his wife and daughter. He ends up in Hell, but is given a choice by a batdemon. McNulty takes the deal, and is sent back to seek revenge and save his family from Limbo with a skin of special Hellfire. In the process, McNulty discovers things about his former co-workers and himself. This is another story that had me practically in tears, with sympathy for McNulty and the horrible position he has been put in through no fault of his own.

The stories are dark, gritty, and emotionally driven. Barbee is a fantastic writer and I look forward to reading much more by him in the near future. Recommended.

Contains: graphic violence and adult language

Reviewed by: Colleen Wanglund

Posted on June 24, 2016 by , Reply
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