Bullet Through Your Face – Edward Lee

Bullet Through Your Face – Edward Lee
Deadite Press – 2010

I rarely give up on a book, and when I do, it’s usually a piece of garbage about new age occultism. I normally struggle through fiction even if it’s awful, but I could not bring myself to finish this one.

Bullet Through Your Face is a collection of three “short novels” by Edward Lee. I’ve read and enjoyed books by Edward Lee before, and I was well aware of his reputation, but this was a disappointing pile of crap.

Ever Nat, the first story in here an extremely unpleasant tale of a man being kidnapped and brutally raped over and over (ever nat) by a pair of hillbillys. Both of the other books I’d read by Lee featured a pair of rapist hillbillys, and I can’t say I was particularly shocked by any of the specific acts of horrendous sexual violence. The problem here is that there’s absolutely nothing else to this story. The other stuff I’d read by Lee had plenty of rape, but it also had aliens, killer worms and a cannibal mutant. This story is 100% rape. Call me a snowflake or a prude, but I didn’t enjoy this.

The next story, The Salt Diviner was about a Babylonian fortune teller showing up in modern times and making friends with a gambler. Oh, and the mystic gets his powers from performing acts of sex or violence. This gets ludicrous pretty quickly, but it was weird and fun. If the whole book had been stuff like this, I would have been happy. This one was very short for a “novel”.

The last, and by far the longest, story in this collection is called The Refrigerator full of Sperm. Now anyone who knows me or has followed this blog for any amount of time will know that I have a pretty high threshold for vulgarity and potty humour, but this story was too puerile for me. The Refrigerator full of Sperm was originally published in a collection called Splatterspunk: The Micah Hays Stories, and all of the stories in that collection are about a particularly randy police officer. That in itself was enough to deter me (I hate reading stuff out of sequence.), but the writing here is utterly horrible too. I don’t just mean the events it’s describing either. The story itself, not just the dialogue, is written in a southern drawl. Ugh. No thanks. One of the characters keeps interrupting the narrative with his lurid tales, most of which seemed to involve “peckersnot” and “cornholing”. I enjoy vulgarity very much, but this book taught me that it can get pretty tiresome when it’s dialled up to 11. I got maybe 20 pages into this before giving up. I was actually reading an ebook version, and my kindle gives an estimate of how much time it’s going to take to finish the book. I have a full time job and a family to take care of, so reading is a luxury for me. I could not justify spending two hours of my precious free time reading this trash.

I was pretty disappointed with this collection. It was nowhere near as good as the other stuff I’ve read by Lee. If you haven’t read any of his books, this would be an awful place to start. Deadite Press released this book along with another collection of short stories by Lee called Brain Cheese Buffet in 2010. (Both were titled by Carlton Mellick III.) That one contains shorter stories, so it’s probably the better of the two. I was originally planning on reviewing both books together, but after this crap I reckon I’ll take a break from Lee for a while.

Slither – Edward Lee

edward lee slither Slither – Edward Lee
Leisure Books – 2006

I recently finished John Halkin’s Slither, and it instilled me with a ravenous hunger for books called Slither about killer worms. One simply wasn’t enough. Luckily for me, I’ve had another Slither waiting on my shelf for the past few years. I remember buying this and thinking it looked pretty gross. I knew of Lee’s reputation, and the blurb on the back sounds sickening.

Yep. This was a nasty one. Since the coronavirus lockdown started a little over a month ago, this is the 8th novel I’ve read about mutant infestations. This wasn’t a conscious decision, but I don’t think it was a coincidence either. I’m sure a psychoanalyst would be able to explain my current fascination with genetically modified insects and why reading about them commiting acts of repulsive violence seems preferable to monitoring the rising death rate of the pandemic. While I’ve enjoyed these books, I think I’m going to give this kind of stuff a break for a while. Lee’s book seems to be a good one to end with. This was by far the most disgusting out of all of them, and it was also a lot of fun to read.

The only other book I’ve read by Lee is The Bighead, an infamously disgusting work of splattergore. That book has such a reputation that I expected Slither to be less gross. Surely Edward Lee isn’t that gross all the time? Well, here he is. In John Halkin’s Slither books, a creepy crawly will occasionally chew through an eyeball. In Lee’s Slither, masses of worms are constantly spilling into and out of every human orifice. Oh, and Lee’s worms don’t just eat humans. These worms also mutate humans, lay their eggs in humans, and secrete a chemical that turns humans’ insides to liquid.

This book was fucking gross.

I did really enjoy it though. The characters are fun, and there’s a great plot twist. I had a lot of fun reading this. It’s definitely not for the squeamish though. Seriously. Blech!

The Bighead – Edward Lee

The Bighead – Edward Lee
Overlook Connection Press – 1999
Edward Lee’s The Bighead has a reputation for being one of the grossest books ever written. After reading it, I can confirm that it is truly disgusting. I had to put it down after certain chapters and wait a while before I read more. The ordeals faced by the characters in this book are so repulsive that the reader suffers along with them. This book literally made me squirm. It’s the kind of thing that you’ll be reading and then start to think “What kind of sick perverts read this stuff?”, only to realise that you yourself belong to that group of sick perverts. Honestly, if I saw someone reading this book on the bus, I’d probably get off at a different stop from them.

This is the story of two pretty girls from the big city coming to visit one of their aunts in the countryside. Unfortunately, their trip is interrupted by a rampaging backwoods mutant named the Bighead. There’s an video of Lee online in which he notes that many horror stories have a similar premise. I reviewed a book called Blood Rite a few months ago that was also about a girl trapped in the woods with violent redneck monsters. That book was awful because it was boring. The Bighead avoids this by taking an almost identical premise but pumping it absolutely chock-full of obscene, disgusting, perverse acts of depravity. There’s one part where a redneck empties a pensioner’s colostomy bag over her recently exposed brains, just for the fun of it. The tagline on the back cover reads “Rape. Murder. Brain-Eating…” That’s a pretty concise way of summing it up. Maybe ‘poo-eating’ could have been added to that list too. There’s LOTS of poo-eating.

I knew this book was going to be gross, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as entertaining as it is. The characters are nicely developed, and apart from the gory, disgusting bits, there’s actually some genuinely creepy stuff going on in here involving an abandoned hospice for dying priests and the ghosts of two of the sadistic nuns that used to work there.

the bighead erik wilson Each chapter has a computer generated illustration. Maybe they looked good in 1999, but they haven’t aged very well.

Two versions of The Bighead have been published. The original publishers requested that Lee change some details of the book’s ending. The second edition restored the original ending. The latter version is referred to as ‘the author’s preferred text’, and it’s the one I read. I read somewhere that Lee actually changed his mind again and that he now prefers the first edition’s ending. (So the ‘author’s preferred text’ is actually not the author’s preferred text.) I was very mildly disappointed with the ending of the version I read, but I think I’d probably be saying the same thing if I had read the other one. As far as I know, the endings differ only in their explanation of the Bighead’s origins. Personally, I didn’t feel the need for explanations.

Overall, I was very impressed. The Bighead is sick, but it’s actually really enjoyable. There were a few parts of this book that had me laughing very loudly. I have two more novels by Lee on my shelf, and I am looking forward to reading both.
edward lee slither flesh gothic.jpg