Month: July 2021

Kristopher Triana is well-represented at this year’s Splatterpunk Awards, with two novels and this collection on the ballot, and those who followed the award in previous years will remember his books Full Brutal and Toxic Love. A major theme throughout his work is that of utterly twisted relationships, and Blood Relations homes in on this: the volume contains story after story of family values gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The collection opens with “Thicker than Water”, about a father and daughter who are only able to see each other in brief periods during prison visiting hours. Parental angst builds up, with Triana’s florid prose bringing emotional weight to the macabre subject matter – the recurring image of a porcelain doll thrown from a Ferris wheel being particularly memorable.

“My Name is Chad” is another tale of a warped parent-child relationship, this time from the perspective of the younger party. While preparing for a move a man finds a box of old home movies shot by his father. Playing them, he sees footage of himself as a child, becoming embroiled in a disturbing situation that he no longer remembers, and which makes him question everything he knows about his family. The story has a steep emotional trajectory: the protagonist’s aching hope that the videos will contain footage of his sister, who died when they were children, turns into revulsion when he finds out what actually happened to her.

Continue reading “Blood Relations by Kristopher Triana (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”

The Essential Sick Stuff is an omnibus edition of three separate collections: The Sick Stuff, More Sick Stuff and Even Sicker Stuff. The first of these, originally published in 2009, includes a few stories from the early nineties when author Ronald Kelly’s career was just beginning.

“Housewarming” is a fairly straightforward ghost story in which a man moves into the house of his deceased aunt, whose lingering presence is symbolised by an infestation of spiders. While this story reserves graphic horror for its very end, “Diary” – about a serial killer sharing memories of his formative years – is less sparing with the visceral details. A typical passage: “They sent me to reform school when I was seventeen for cutting off my girlfriend’s breasts with a pocket knife. After all these years, I still haven’t figured out what my true motives had been. Maybe someday I’ll call her up at the state asylum and ask her if she remembers why I did such a horrible thing.”

The other early story in The Sick Stuff shows Kelly’s propensity for the outright bizarre. Entitled “Old Hacker” it has a narrator reminiscing about a strange local man who had the disgusting habit of hacking up gobs of spittle – that turned out to be alive.

The remaining stories in the first anthology are comparatively recent, being originally published in either 2008 or 2009. Nonetheless, the themes of Kelly’s early work are still evident. His fondness for fiction about serial killers turns up in “Mass Appeal”, about an eight-year-old boy who is obsessed with mass murderers and has dreams of spending time with historical evildoers: giving Vlad the Impaler a cake for his birthday, sharing bubblegum with Uncle Adolf and having target practice with Charles Whitman. “Pins and Needles” is about a man who hides poison and sharp implements in trick-or-treat candy for the banal reason that he dislikes children, and then receives an ironic punishment worthy of an EC horror comic.

Continue reading “The Essential Sick Stuff by Ronald Kelly (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”

Cerberus Rising consists of nine stories in all, with the three authors – Patrick C. Harrison III, Chris Miller and M. Ennenbach – each tackling three specific themes.

The first theme is cabin fever. “Insides Out” by Patrick C. Harrison III is set in a farmhouse were a family gathered together for Thanksgiving and then died, leaving the father of the house the sole survivor. Narrating the story, the father is in no hurry to divulge the exact cause of the mass death, instead showing a curiously apathetic attitude towards the relatives whose corpses now surround his house as he details events leading up to the tragedy. First comes weird atmospheric phenomena, then surreal body horror involving levitating organs, then the emotional deterioration of the survivors until the father reaches his present insensitive state. The familiar (to Americans, at least) annoyances that sometimes come with extended-family Thanksgivings are twisted into a grotesque parody.

Chris Miller’s take on the theme is “Into the Light”, the story of a family that has spent ten years in a bunker at the behest of its paranoid patriarch, who insists that “they” are on the outside. The narrator, Myla, was born on the inside. The story builds up the quirks that define each character: the father’s all-consuming fear of a “they” that he cannot even identify; the mother’s ability to draw a shell around herself and accept the situation as normal; the growing frustrations of teenager Bobby; and the unquestioning obedience of Myla, who simply knows no other existence. When Bobby breaks the family’s golden rule by taking a step outside, Myla is caught between her parents, her brother – and, perhaps, “them.”

Continue reading “Cerberus Rising by Patrick C. Harrison III, Chris Miller and M. Ennenbach (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”