Month: June 2021

In March 1993 metal singer Corey Collins meets the girl of his dreams at a karaoke bar in the small New York town of Fenton. Named Sandy “Btella” Bellavia, she captures Corey’s attention not only with her physical beauty but also her badges honouring sundry metal bands: “she had sworn the blood oath at the altar of the Gods of Metal, making her hard as tempered steel.”

Bella takes Corey home with her, and he is initially eager for a night of sex and metal. It soon turns out that Bella is not all she appears to be, however, and Corey’s new beau is none other than an ancient demoness of ice and snow. Furthermore, with Fenton hit by a heavy blizzard, Bella is in her element – and Corey’s chances of escape are drastically reduced…

Bella’s Boys is based partly upon author Thomas R. Clark’s experience of being an early-nineties metalhead who found himself caught up in the vast blizzard that his the eastern US in 1993, with a twist of cosmic horror. In creating his eldritch villainess, Clark draws upon the mythology of multiple cultures. Bella originated as as Sbli’rldlnisa-aea, the Great Old Goddess of the Ice and Snow, but to the Norsemen who came across her she became Angraboda, the daughter of Hel and the Fenris Wolf. Native American beliefs also play a part, with Fenton located near an Onondaga reservation. In the folklore of this people, Bella is known as Ne-On-Yar-He (or “Neon Harry”, as Corey corrupts the term). We see Bella’s history unfold via sequences written from her point of view as she preys upon humanity through the ages.

Continue reading “Bella’s Boys: A Tale of Cosmic Horror by Thomas R. Clark (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”

The Death’s Head Press Splatter Western series is something that will be turning up rather a lot in this review series. Many of the books deal with grim-faced gunslingers, as would be expected from horror-western hybrids, but with The Night Silver River Run Red Christine Morgan bucks the general trend: the story is less Clint Eastwood and more Tom Sawyer, albeit with a greater degree of disembowelment than Mark Twain included in his novel.

The story begins with four children – Emmett, Cody, Albert and Mina – sneaking out of their beds at night to visit a freak show. Along the way, they encounter two boys and a girl who belong to the Truthers. This community, presumably a religious sect, generally remain silent around outsiders, although the girl breaks this tradition by giving her name as Saleel. Not all the people the roving children meet on their nocturnal jaunt are as benevolent, however, as becomes clear when they un into what appears to be a pack of human-animal hybrids:

Emmett had the briefest impression of a looming, lunging, shaggy-hair mass, some nightmare bear-buffalo thing coming at them, not slowing even as Cody let fly another pebble with Deadeye, and he lobbed the lantern at it with every bit of his strength […] the fiery missile struck dead-center, splashing burning kerosene, igniting that hairy-woolly-shaggy hide in a genuine conflagration. Oh, and the shrieks the thing made were unlike any Emmett had ever heard in his life, awful rising catamount cries mixed with the metallic screech of train-wheels when the engineer laid in hard on the brakes, while somehow terribly human too.

Continue reading “The Night Silver River Run Red by Christine Morgan (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”

Juniper is a small and obscure town in America’s deep south: “You wouldn’t find it on any map, try a you might, because it seemed to evade those looking for it, hidden within a crease or untraceable like floaters in the eye.” Those who live near the town despise it; those who live within merely survive it – something that has grown increasingly hard. A flood wiped out Juniper’s main industry of farming, and after this came an intense heatwave that plunged the town into outright famine. In desperation, the residents begin breeding cats for food, referring to their feline food-source simply as “livestock”.

Ross Jeffrey’s novella is in large part the story of two women. One is Betty Davis, an ambiguously-aged recluse who lives on the edge of town and has been forced to survive on roadkill scraped from the cracked tarmac. Her latest discovery, a large ginger tomcat, turns out to be – despite a serious amount of injury and mangling – still alive, and so it becomes her companion rather than her next meal.

Continue reading “Juniper by Ross Jeffrey (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”

This is the sequel to a Splatterpunk Award finalist of the previous year, How Much To…?, the plot of which was based around a gruelling (and very much illegal) online game show. The premise was that the contestants were offered a series of increasingly repulsive tasks and asked how much money they would accept for undertaking them; the winner was promised their chosen sum as a prize – but only if they performed each and every task on the list, no matter how appalling or obscene. As a premise for a splatterpunk novella, this was quite clever: readers were forced to run each gruelling scenario through their heads even before the unlucky winner had to undertake them at the end. But is there really room for a sequel to repeat the trick?

As it happens, How Much 2 finds a neat way of retooling the original novella’s formula: by having the producers of the game show retool their formula. The story introduces us to Sharon Devlin and Nate Stephenson, each of whom have behind-the-scenes roles; but while Sharon is a traditionalist, Nate is a young rebel who wants to take the show in new directions – much to the distaste of Sharon, who associates new approaches with smaller audiences.

Continue reading “How Much 2 by Matt Shaw (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”