Polish Extreme is an anthology of horror stories originating in Poland – or, at least, themed around Poland. The book opens with Tomasz Czarny’s “Can of Coke” in which Meg, a busty Goth girl, works at a delicatessen and puts up with the unwanted attention of her lecherous boss Sloan. As unpleasant as Sloan typically is, when Meg walks in on him indulging a drug habit, he soon manages to take a turn for the worse. In terms of storytelling aesthetics, rather than subject matter, this is the oddest entry in the anthology. Its plot hinges on an awkward turn of phrase (which may well have sounded more natural in Polish) and it lacks any structure of the sort that is conventional in English-language horror: there is nothing that can really be termed a surprise twist, for example, no revenge to follow the rape. It is primarily a character study in grossness that grows until it reaches a brutal climax.
Next comes “Vomit Your Soul” by Lukasz Rasecki, the monologue of a man who kidnaps and tortures to death members of heavy metal subcultures. After a graphic description of his latest victim (a seventeen-year-old grindcore guitarist) the narrator divulges his motivations, revealing that he is a religious moralist who sees himself as punishing sinners. The character portrait is thick with irony: the torturer tolerates music that glorifies Satan, on the grounds that doing so implies a belief in God, but despises metal that glorifies death and nihilism; he disdains cruelty to animals, but sews them inside his victims; and he shows an in-depth, almost fanboyish knowledge of the bands he loathes (the author is himself a metal musician). The ultimate irony is that he has become a figure worthy of the death metal songs that he so despises.
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