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Book Review: To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

cover art for To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

To Dust You Shall Return by Fred Venturini

Turner Publishing, 2021 (release date June 21)

ISBN: 9781684426348

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

 

If you only have the budget to purchase one book for the entire year, this is the one to buy.  To Dust You Shall Return is superior to everything else out there, might as well just hand the author the Stoker award for best horror novel of 2021 and skip the drawn-out nomination process.  It’s that good: other authors will be hard pressed to equal it.

 

Most of the story is set in Harlow, one of those Children of the Corn-type Midwestern towns you could drive through and not know if anyone actually lives there.  Curtis Quinn, an aging ex-Mafia hitman with a price on his head, is led there while on the trail of whoever butchered his beloved wife into pieces.  He suspects it’s a revenge hit to get to him, but what he finds in Harlow is much more sinister and terrifying than anything the Mafia could have dished out.  Harlow residents live in fear of the Mayor, a sadistic madman (or is he?) with inhuman powers.  The residents’ only hope is the legend of the Griffin, an outsider who may one day come to deliver the townspeople from the Mayor’s grasp.  Could Curtis, a cold-blooded killer, be that man, and is it somehow connected to his wife’s murder?

 

The story scores unbelievably high on every possible level, but the excitement and originality are the two best points.  After a brief prologue, the story shifts into high gear right away, and, in 352 pages, doesn’t let up.  There’s never a hint of a slowdown: this is the type of book you will keep reading well into the night, until exhaustion sets in.  For originality, Harlow itself is one of the most intriguing fictional towns ever invented; it’s an unusual cross between a communist community and Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines.  Residents are provided for and given jobs, but the cost is never being able to leave the town, exceept for a forays lasting a brief hour or two.  The town is surrounded with razor wire and various traps to keep the people in.  If they do escape, rangers track them down and return them to Harlow, where they are ritually slaughtered in front of the townspeople in extremely painful and bloody ways.  This causes the book’s gore factor to run high at times, but it is always in service to the story, never gratuitous for the shock factor.  That said, some of the killings are as hardcore as anything Jack Ketchum ever wrote and will make readers cower in fear, praying to forget what they just read.

 

The characters and plot also sell themselves by their unpredictability: the story does not go where you would expect.  Numerous characters double-cross each other, and the book becomes a guessing game,  keeping the story engrossing.  The legend of the Griffin also helps drive the story’s unexpected twists and turns, as most stories with a creepy little town rarely use the “savior” angle.  It’s just another example of what sets this story apart from all the competition.  Bottom line: just buy this one, and prepare to be blown away.  You won’t be disappointed.  This is beyond highly recommended.

 

Contains: blood, gore, profanity, cannibalism, ritualistic torture.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on May 13, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Chew on This! edited by Robert Essig

Cover art for 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 , Reply

Book Review The Virgin by Wol-vriey

Content warning: unless you have a strong stomach you may want to skip over this review.

 

The Virgin by [Wol-vriey]

The Virgin by Wol-vriey  ( Amazon.com)

Burning Bulb Publishing, 2020

ISBN: 9781948278232

Availability: paperback, Kindle

 

Wol-vriey’s latest effort, The Virgin, is unquestionably his best to date, and also the most likely to offend people; this isn’t the kind of book you want your mother seeing you read.  It’s highly creative and original, but fair warning: it revolves around a reality show where rape is expected of the contestants, although the contestants willingly signed up for the show knowing this.  This is true hardcore, if you can handle that, read on.  If not, don’t bother.

“The Virgin” is a reality TV show broadcast on the “dark web” to whatever sleazy individuals are willing to pay the exorbitant fees to watch it.  It involves five ladies (virgins, obviously) who are placed in a Hollywood style mock-up town somewhere in America.  (if you’ve read Wol-vriey before, you can make a pretty good guess where he put the town)  The ladies have to survive and avoid getting raped for three hours, as there are ten “suitors” in the town trying to track them down for forced sex.  The ladies are not defenseless: each of them is given a choice of one weapon to carry with them, and there are plenty of weapons scattered throughout the town.  That’s one advantage to the ladies: they have some defense in the beginning, while the suitors have none.  Once everyone is in the town, anything goes, and it’s a question of survival.

The plotline itself is quite original. Authors have used reality shows before, but this is truly a new concept, although a sick and twisted one.  If this was just a standard hack and slash, it would have been good, not great.  The other elements Wol-vriey thought of and added in are what push this to the next level, and make for great storytelling.  For example, the money pot for the ladies is $10 million, but the catch is, it has to be split among the ladies that survive and avoid sex.  One person survives intact, she gets the ten million.  Two survive, they each get five.  Three survive…you get the idea.  Not only do the ladies have to contend with the suitors, they have excellent incentive to kill each other off.  There are “safe spaces” built into the show, a few churches where you can take a 15 minute break and not be touched.  To counter that, there are also traps built into many of the buildings, to prevent the contestants from hiding for the duration.  Rats, spiders, rattlesnakes, acid vats…they all make an appearance, keeping the story from becoming a standard kill-fest.

The book contains everything you’ve come to expect from Wol-vriey: gore, graphic sex, and his trademark dark humor that shows up at times.  Example: why is the show three hours long?  If you’ve ever heard a Viagra ad, you know the answer.  The writing is fine and pushes the story along at a brisk clip, but it’s the creativity that sets this one apart from his other efforts, and from most horror stories in general.  Highly recommended, but only for hardcore horror readers who want the limits pushed.  Other readers who prefer tamer material would do best to take a pass on this one.

 

 

Contains: violence, extreme gore, graphic sex, profanity, rape.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

Posted on September 1, 2020 by , Reply
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