John Russo wrote Night of the Living Dead with George Romero. I have been meaning to read something by him for years. I settled on his 1987 novel, Voodoo Dawn.

This was pure garbage. It only took a few hours to read it, but every second of those hours felt as if the author was laughing at me for wasting my time reading his filthy pile of shit.

A voodoo witchdoctor goes on a killing spree in an attempt to make a Frankensteinesque voodoo doll out of human body parts. The premise here is good, but the execution reeks of human excrement. The discussion of the life sized voodoo doll is limited to a few sentences, and the murders take up only a few pages. Most of this novel focuses on the business plans of a gang of up-and-coming advertising executives. It’s shockingly boring. There was a little bit of satisfaction when these boring squares died, but it would have been much more satisfying to witness the author being brutally dismembered with a machete for making me read through his boring, dull, uninspired shite.

At one point the author describes how one of the characters is struggling to flesh out her book on voodoo and how she ultimately resorts to inserting large quotations from other books instead of integrating their main ideas into her work. Russo then proceeds to insert a large quote from one of the books that the character was supposedly reading. He’s literally flaunting his inadequacies to his readers’ faces.

Apparently there’s a movie with the same title that was very, very loosely based on this book. I doubt I’ll watch it. Honestly, avoid this book like you would a leper. It’s a diaper full of diarrhea.