Welcome to the Splatter Club, Vol. 3, by various authors
Blood Bound Publishing, 2024
ISBN: 9781940250632
Available: Paperback, Kindle edition
Buy: Amazon.com
If you read the other Splatter Club books, you know what to expect: gore, raunchiness, creativity, and warped humor. The third installment continues the tradition. Overall, it’s very good, although not quite to the level of Volume 2: but that’s a pretty high bar to clear. It’s certainly good enough to confirm the series as one that should keep running in the future.
There are nine short stories of varying length, plus four additional stories of a couple pages each that were winners in last year’s gross-out writing contest at Authorcon II. The book would have been better off leaving those four out, as they really don’t add anything, and just read like an excuse to be disgusting. Still, for readers that just want some barf-inducing material, they’re here.
The other nine stories are all good ‘uns, with Rachel Nussbaum’s ‘”You’re Mine Now” being the runaway winner for the best. The hard-luck protagonist gets partly possessed by a somewhat nice demon, who proceeds to help him fix his life, in suitably violent and bone-crunching fashion. It’s the interplay between the lead character and the demon that makes this roaring good fun: their conversations are priceless. The whole ‘demon with a bit of heart’ is an angle that doesn’t get used often, it’s an intriguing one.
Stephen Kozeniewski’s ‘”Self Reporting” also deserves mention, for its wickedly humorous style, and re-doing of a horror trope. We all know killing your family is bad, but this turns it into survival of the father, in a hilariously warped way. This is definitely a new way to use a pandemic for a horror story.
Setting aside the four gross-out shorties, the rest are what make the Splatter Club series better than the rest. There are no bad stories to be found. The quality does vary, but the absolute worst you can say about any of them is “pretty good..” There are no misses to be found. I’ve reviewed a LOT of short story anthologies over the past few years, and it’s almost impossible to find one without at least a couple duds. Splatter Club pulls off the trick of consistent quality throughout, and that’s pretty rare. Not all the stories will blow your socks off, but there are none to skip over.
Drumroll please! The BOTTOM LINE is…if you want creative craziness with plenty of bloody mayhem and twisted humor, you want this book. Read it, destroy your mind, and carry on, till hopefully Volume 4 arrives. Recommended.
Reviewed by Murray Samuelson
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