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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 Final Cut by Craig DiLouie

Cover art for The Final Cut by Craig DiLouie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Final Cut by Craig DiLouie

ZING Communications, 2021

ISBN: 9798782486884

Available: paperback, Kindle edition (Amazon.com )

 

This is the final of a three book series, I have not read the other two, titled Infection and The Killing Floor.  While this book can be enjoyed as a stand-alone, it is recommended that you read the others first for full understanding and enjoyment of the story.  

 

We all know that zombie stories are like the undead themselves: just when you think the trend might finally be over, along comes another one.  Thankfully, The Final Cut bucks the usual zombie storylines and clichés, carves a path of its own… and does it well, breathing new life into what has become a stale genre.

 

In The Final Cut, the culprit for zombification is an organism from space, known as Infection, that has managed to infect most of the population. Here’s what makes the story fun: not everyone reacts the same way, or goes through the same Infection.  Some people have it for days or months before they go nuts and become killers…and some have learned to live and adapt to Infection, becoming almost superhuman but NOT becoming crazy.  That’s one of the best points of the book, the “zombies” are a mishmash of types.  Some are mindless, some can talk and reason, some are evil, some are more or less good– the variety helps keep the story interesting.  

 

As for the uninfected humans, besides survival they are focused on two things: finding a cure for Infection, or finding a way to wipe out all those Infected, and ending the plague.   There is still a semblance of a US government working on a solution in the book.  The author throws some interesting moral dilemmas to the characters: which makes more sense?  Go the easier route and blast everything to pieces to save the few left and take the collateral damage, or try the harder but preferable route of finding a cure?  The “ends justify the means” idea poses tough decisions for some of the characters, such as the need to test a possible cure on human subjects… but no volunteers.  Is capturing unwilling people to use ae guinea pigs justifiable, when your goal is saving people?  The author does a great job using these situations, without sounding preachy.

 

In any zombie novel, there will be violence and gunfights somewhere, and in that area, The Final Cut delivers the goods.  Tanks wrecking things, .50 caliber machine guns shredding zombies and creating carnage, plenty of pitched firefights– there’s enough to keep the entertainment level high.  Overall, this is a thinking person’s action/excitement novel and worth the read, even if zombie stories usually aren’t your thing.  Recommended (after reading the first two, that is)

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on May 27, 2022 by , Reply

Book Review: Maggie’s Grave: A Horror Novel by David Sodergren

cover art for Maggie's Grave: A Horror Novel by David Sodergren

Maggie’s Grave: A Horror Novel by David Sodergren

Paperbacks and Pugs, 2020

ISBN: 9798680192276

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Amazon.com )

 

Things not to do when visiting Scotland: Don’t visit a dead witch’s mountaintop grave; don’t light the grave’s cross on fire; and DON’T have sex on the grave with one of the local teenagers.  Why?  Because when Maggie the witch wakes up she is going to be extremely pissed off and want revenge on the tiny town below, since they cut her baby out of her and killed it and her a few hundred years prior.  Author David Sodergren is quickly carving out a niche as one of the better writers in the horror genre.

 

The plot is actually a bit more elaborate than that, but there is no sense spoiling the fun for the reader.  There’s just enough time spent developing the setting and characters to get you interested in them, and then it’s off to the races.  In this case, the main characters are the four (and only) teen-agers in the dying town of Auchenmullan, with a whopping total population of forty-seven.  Almost no one is ever born there, and people only move away, not to the town.  The teens have nothing to do but work an occasional menial job, have sex, get drunk, and hang out at the local bowling alley.  Heck, their theme song, to the Joan Jett melody, is “I love…t’get drunk n’ bowl!”  A dumb, wandering, American tourist provides some diversion, and on the trip to Maggie’s grave, all hell breaks loose.

 

As he did in his first two books, Sodergren keeps his foot on the gas throughout the book; there’s no slowdown.  He fills in the backstory of Maggie throughout the book, and the other members of the town are involved in the plot.  Thankfully, the mystery isn’t revealed in one long, drawn-out monologue at the end, but in pieces where appropriate, so the novel’s pacing doesn’t slow down.  Maggie is responsible for almost all of the bloodletting in the book, and she makes enough of a mess to keep gorehound readers happy: she has a habit of inventing new ways to mangle people when they are unclothed and in compromising positions.  She also isn’t constrained by the boundaries of the town, which allows the story to move outside of Auchenmullan at times for some variety.  There’s dark humor throughout, and, once again, the author comes up with a perfect twist for the ending that the reader won’t see coming.  The story also does a good job throughout playing on the classic Vulcan axiom: do the needs of the many truly outweigh the needs of the few…or the one?

 

It’s now a string of three winning horror novels in a row for the author. Horror fans won’t be disappointed by this one.  Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson.

Posted on May 3, 2022 by , Reply
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