Genital Grinder – Ryan Harding

Genital Grinder – Ryan Harding
Deadite Press – 2012

A few weeks ago I wrote a pretty scathing review of Edward Lee’s Bullet Through your Face. My main complaint was that the book seemed to exist solely for the sake of being gross and offensive. I read an ebook version, and when I was writing the review, I had to google for a jpg of the book’s cover. In doing so I clicked onto the publisher’s website and saw the cover of another book called Genital Grinder. I was literally in the process of complaining about a text that was too vulgarly disgusting, but a book named after an early Carcass song is not something I could pass up on. I needed to get my genitals ground immediately.

Imagine my concern when I started reading and realised that the introduction of the book was written by none other than Edward Lee. (I do actually like Lee; I just think that the last book I read by him sucked.) In this introduction Lee warns the reader that the stories in this book are real sicko stuff.

He wasn’t exaggerating. This book is vile. He first story is about a man getting stuck under a very fat woman who has just died of a heart attack. You can guess the first thing that happens, but what follows is both hideous and unexpected. Another of the tales is about two truly scummy dudes who find and violate the corpse of a car crash victim. These two gents, Von and Greg, show up in a couple of other stories, both of which involve kidnapping, rape and sadistic murders. The other stories, aside from the last one, are more of the same – lots of kidnapping, rape and brutal violence.

While this is pretty rough going, these tales are actually stories. Harding, while capable of being both repulsive and very funny, avoids the boring vulgarity that ruined the Lee book that led me to Genital Grinder. There’s suspense and plot twists and more high brow literature stuff in here. The last tale in the collection is an artier piece than the others, more in the vein of Koja or maybe even Ligotti. It wasn’t bad, but I thought it felt a bit out of place.

Many of the characters in this book are violent, sadistic, mysogynistic rapists. If you’re going to read a book called Genital Grinder, you probably shouldn’t expect it to be inoffensive, but I have to say, this was really, really rapey. Of all the acts of barbarity that occur in this novel, I don’t think any are performed by a female character. One of the stories features several woman being kidnapped, raped and surgically altered. One has her anus removed, and one has several vaginas implanted on her torso. Some parts of the book are so visceral that it feels like it’s encroaching on that fine line between violent horror and violent pornography. That being said, I understand that this is fiction, and I’m not accusing the author of anything. I just want to warn my readers before they check this out. This book is really fucked up.

This was a horrible, horrible book, but it was decently written, and some parts were quite funny. I would definitely consider reading more by Ryan Harding in the future.