Month: June 2020

Resisting Madness is a collection of stories by Wesley Southard, whose novella One for the Road is also up for a Splatterpunk Award. As is to be expected from a collection that stretches back into the author’s early days, the book gets off to a shaky start. It opens with Southard’s first published story, “With Many Thanks to Newark”, in which a horror writer (a fairly transparent self-insertion) ends up on a plane filled with vampires: individual scenes have merit, but the overall plot is weak. Next is “Arrearages”, about an abusive man who wakes to find that the various women he has wronged are calling him via mobile phones that they implanted in his body. This is more effective but, like many EC Comics-style horror stories of ironic revenge, falls apart once the reader starts thinking about it – just how did they insert those telephones without him noticing?

After these early, rougher stories, we see Southard becoming more confident in his work while maintaining his fondness for absurd scenarios, sick jokes and broadly-rendered protagonists. “Minor Leaguer” is about a man tied to a goal in an ice-rink, where an unhinged hockey layer tries to torture answers out of him. “Between Those Walls” is a jailbreak story that segues into horror when the prison turns out to have a macabre secret. “King Cake”, which sees a group of bickering siblings get together to honour their departed mother only to find an unpleasant surprise in the cake, is an example of Southard’s skill at sketching out his characters.

Continue reading “Resisting Madness by Wesley Southard (2020 Splatterpunk Awards)”

Note: I posted this review before it was widespread knowledge that author Matt Hayward was a harasser (see here and here for background). My comments on his book should in no way be taken as an endorsement of his behaviour.

Here we have a story collection that thrives on the idea that things are not always as they seem, in which high strangeness lurks between cracks in the everyday. This theme can be found across the individual stories, but it is also evident in the collection itself. What initially seems like a set of conventional horror tales turns out to be something more oddball and idiosyncratic.

To start with the comparatively familiar, Hayward shows that he is unafraid to homage past masters. “Where the Wild Winds Blow” reads like a sort of inebriated Poe story: a drink-driver hits a homeless man and is haunted by guilt as he tries to get back to his girlfriend. “Mutt” is a take on the Dorian Gray theme, its main character a boy from a broken home who moves to a new house with his mother, where he adopts a stray puppy; years pass, the mother develops health problems, but the dog remains a frisky young pup.

“The Call of the Children” explores Cronenbergian body horror. A boy hears from the local bullies that his missing brother has been found; he follows them to an abandoned house, only to find that his brother and the bullies are controlled by a strange slug-like creature. “Comes with the Rain” covers similar ground, the main character finding his dog weirdly drained and dehydrated by some sort of leech – which can also affect humans.

Some of the stories use settings created by other writers. “Dark Stage” was written for the Welcome to the Show anthology, in which all the stories involved a cursed bar; Hayward depicts a strange, ghoulish visitor taking the stage in an open mic night. Meanwhile, “Bangers and Mash” has J. F. Gonzale\’s Clickers arriving in Northern Ireland, where they become a sought-after delicacy.

Continue reading “Various States of Decay by Matt Hayward (2020 Splatterpunk Awards)”

This collection kicks off with its title novella “Dirty Rotten Hippies”, which takes up nearly a third of book. The story depicts a music festival being hit by a new drug called Delight that brings a great high, followed by an existential low, and finally turns the victim into a zombie. Mayhem ensues, and comes to embroil a range of characters who happen to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time: elderly Dan Ferguson, a man old enough to remember the first wave of hippies; his gun-toting wife Helen; Travis Kincaid, a college student with a love of the sixties counterculture; Oscar Perez, a music journalist; and Kyle Bile, a rock star with a grudge against Oscar. Things get even crazier when it turns out that the zombies are not the only flesh-eaters in the area: Travis falls into a trap set by a clan of cannibal meth-heads.

The novella’s cartoonish ethos can be found in a number of the collection’s other stories. In “Chainsaw Sex Maniacs from Mars”, backwoods America is invaded by coverall-clad grey alien rednecks (“Gonna blow a load of Martian spunk up yonder blondie’s poophole”). “Some Crazy Fucking Shit that Happened One Day” sees its protagonist argue with his former-porn-actress girlfriend before falling in with a busload of seductive cheerleaders; but this dream scenario comes with a catch, as the cheerleaders are devil-worshippers plotting a chainsaw-based ritual to resurrect a band of Nazi zombies. In his introduction, Bryan Smith reveals that he wrote the story in under 24 hours after his Facebook followers decided the subject matter via a poll.

Continue reading “Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories by Bryan Smith (2020 Splatterpunk Awards)”