Tag: extreme horror

Duncan Ralston’s WOOM

Woom – Duncan Ralston
Shadow Work – 2016


When I was reading about Matthew Stokoes Cows a few days ago, I came across a comparison to this book. I had downloaded an audiobook version of WOOM a few months back, and seeing that it was very short, I decided to give it a go.

A weird lad invites a prostitute to a hotel room and tells her gross stories while he tries to stretch out her vagina. Some of the stories are pretty nasty, but nothing in here really surprised me. This is the second book in a row that I’ve finished that contains a scene where somebody kills themselves by a self-administered abortion. I assumed that the narrator was working himself up to some horrible climax where he would do something really nasty to the woman he is talking to, and I was quite disappointed to find that my assumption was entirely correct.

This book proudly claims to be extreme horror on the cover. I understand that extreme horror often contains rape scenes. Detailed descriptions of fictional rapes don’t really bother me, but I am sometimes bothered by how rape is used in transgressive fiction. This book, while well written and plotted out, is essentially the story of a man raping a prostitute. He rapes her in a particularly unpleasant manner, but the specifics of his actions didn’t disappoint me. It was the fact that the whole book is essentially just a lead up to a rape.

Again, I don’t mind authors using rape in their stories. There’s loads of ways that rape could be used in an extreme horror story. Using it as the punchline seems lazy.

Some might say that the horrible ending to the book is to make some profound statement on the unpleasantness of existence. Let’s Go Play at The Adams’ uses rape to effectively convey this message. I don’t think that WOOM is operating on that level though. It’s not that sophisticated. One of the chapters in here is about an exploding bumhole.

I actually did enjoy reading the book, and I think Ralston is a capable writer. The plotting here is quite impressive. I just really disliked the ending. I’d be willing to give Ralston another go.

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.

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.