Home » Archive by category "Uncategorized" (Page 118)

Book Review: Chew on This! edited by Robert Essig

Chew on This! edited by Robert Essig

Blood Bound Books, 2020

ISBN: 9781940250465

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Amazon.com )

Chew on This is a themed horror anthology dealing with…food. Can food actually be horrifying? Based on this book, the answer is a resounding “yes.” It combines creativity and gut-wrenching disgust into a brew of good stories. Fair warning: some of these stories are truly barf-inducing, and sicker than any “splat” style horror writing. Combinations of food and body fluids (and limbs), babies roasted in ovens: it’s all on the table. This is a fun batch of horror stories, and also the National Restaurant Association’s worst nightmare.

With only a few exceptions, the overall story quality varies from good to very good, and most of them aren’t disgusting, just good, smart stories. Some of them are “cycle” stories, where the story focuses on one event and then ends, leading into another of the same event. Chad Lutzke’s “Cherry Red” and Kristopher Trianna’s ‘The Feeding” fall into this category. One deals with a psychotic kid and his fascination with red cereal box toys, the other with a sandwich delivery service that takes much more than the customer’s money. Ronald Kelly’s “Grandma’s Favorite Recipe” is Kelly doing what he does best: taking a lovable southern character, in this case the “saintly granny,” and turning her into something more sinister, by way of her cooking. Vivian Kayley’s “Roly Poly” is notable for its entertaining look at the lengths some unfortunate women will go to for weight loss. It’s also the only story in the book with a happy ending. Shenoa Carroll-Bradd’s “Barrel Aged” may be the most intriguing story, although it might take a second read to understand, as the author squirrels away the most important details in only a few sentences.

If you want to avoid (or read first) the stomach churners, here they are. They are solid pieces, just gruesome. Tonia Brown’s “A Woman’s Work” features the aforementioned cooked human baby, and John McNee’s “With a Little Salt and Vinegar” has an eating contest, with dead fetuses on the menu. Nikki Noir’s “Magick Brew” is a hilarious look at combining a certain reproductive body fluid with margaritas to make a drink that renders the consumer ravenous with lust…to the extreme. The true pukefest is K. Trap Jones’s “Seeds of Filth”. With restaurant employees combining any and all types of bodily fluids with condiments and serving them to rude customers, this story is likely to make the average reader upchuck their last meal. It might be the most revolting story ever committed to paper.

Overall, Chew on This is a well-written, creative anthology, it just takes a stomach of iron at times to read the full book. Recommended.

Contains: violence, profanity, gore, body horror, cannibalism, and everything disgusting you can think of

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Kirsten, Reply

Book Review: Unseemly by Jason Parent

Unseemly by Jason Parent

Corpus Press, 2016

ISBN: 9781523980307

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

Unseemly is a nice little story that uses creatures rarely seen in horror stories as its backbone: fairies. In a quick 59 pages, the authors crams in the story of a group of academics/grave robbers out to find fairy gold, and the bloody disaster that befalls them. It’s a fast read, and perfect for a rainy Saturday afternoon of horror escapism.

The first nineteen pages quickly set up the characters, their backstories, and the story objective. Peter Callum is a down-on-his-luck archaeologist with a mountain of debt. He partners with a sleazy grave robber named Dervish and a folklore professor named McCoy to find out if fairies and their legendary gold inhabit a sparely populated, remote Scottish island. The author does a nice job in the few pages allotted creating a perfectly serviceable explanation for why the legends might be true, as well as adding some mystery that concerns the lone village on the island. The group sets off one fateful evening, and they get much more than they expected, as the fairies aren’t the cutesy type you find in Disney films. The story quickly wraps up with a violent, unexpected ending.

Unseemly does what a good short story or novella is supposed to do: hook the readers with a quick setup, dose them with excitement, and end it with a twist or two. There’s just enough story to assist the reader in forming opinions about the main characters, the ending is unexpected enough to not be predictable, and the story moves quickly, leaving out overly-detailed explanations. The one place a bit more elaboration would have helped is the fairies-to-monsters part, which was a little hard to visualize from a reader’s perspective with the amount of description provided.

Overall, a good, quick story, good enough to easily justify the paperback price of $5.50.

Contains: violence, mild gore, profanity

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Kirsten, Reply

The Vampirates Are Here! A Guest Reading from Justin Somper

As promised from earlier this week, not only have we published a review of the first book in the Vampirates series, Vampirates: Demons of the Ocean, but as we are participating in a blog tour for the series, we have a guest reading from the author, Justin Somper (accompanied by his dog, Bella). Justin chose to read a rather gruesome scene from the third book in the series, Vampirates: Blood Captain. This book is considerably longer and gets much deeper into characterization of the pirates– Connor is only briefly mentioned, and Grace not at all– but it is a great, suspenseful, dark scene that I’m sure will encourage you to continue on through the series past the first book. All six are scheduled to be reprinted this month: #1 Demons of the Ocean, #2 Tide of Terror, #3 Blood Captain, #4 Black Heart, #5 Empire of Night and #6 Immortal War. With the completed series available, I’m sure we’ll see middle-grade and early teen readers zip right through them! Thanks very much to Justin for providing us with this great reading from Blood Captain!