Month: August 2021

I’m a little late in posting this, given that the awards were presented a week ago, but I’ve only just finished reviewing the books. So, let’s wrap things up with a complete list…

BEST NOVEL

• WINNER: The Magpie Coffin by Wile E. Young (Death’s Head Press)
• Pandemonium by Ryan Harding and Lucas Mangum (Death’s Head Press)
• Tome by Ross Jeffery (The Writing Collective)
• Dust by Chris Miller (Death’s Head Press)
• Slaughter Box by Carver Pike (Self-Published)
• Gone To See The River Man by Kristopher Triana (Cemetery Dance Publications)
• They All Died Screaming by Kristopher Triana (Blood Bound Books)

Continue reading “Congratulations to the 2021 Splatterpunk Award Winners!”

Tome begins with Jasper, an incarcerated serial killer, hearing a voice that compels him to bash his brains out on the wall of his cell. When prison guard Frank Whitten sees the gruesome result of this act, his immediate response is to call out “We’ve got another one!”

Clearly, something sinister is afoot.

This is the sequel to Ross Jeffery’s novella Juniper (also on the Splatterpunk Award ballot) and takes place in the fictional town of that book’s title. This time, however, we see a different area of Juniper. While the original novella treated us to the (already harrowing) sight sight of what went on in the burning sun of boa daylight, Tome takes us to the darker corners, introducing us to the people so bad that even Juniper places them behind bars.

Readers will be introduced to Antonio, a gargantuan child-molester; Henry Crumb, leader of a Neo-Nazi group called the Sisters whose situation has driven them to homosexuality; and Klein, a wife-beater who “hadn’t been aiming to leave a bloody mess of a woman, he’d been planning to leave a bloody corpse of a woman” (Klein’s wife Janet is a central character in Juniper, making him one of the few direct connections between the two books).

The authorities are scarcely better than the criminal underworld. Tome emphasises racism as a particularly grave evil, one embodied by the character of Hezekiah Fleming. A warden at the prison, Fleming is an avowed racist; his office has a taxidermied woodchuck holding a Confederate flag, and he fits right into a prison where a pulley arm once used for hanging slaves is still on display. He receives the opponent of his nightmares in the form of Dolores Fink, sent by the Correctional Investigation team of the US Marshal Office to investigate the suspicious deaths. Being black, she is an immediate object of Fleming’s hostility; but despite all of his efforts, she appears impossible to intimidate. Desperate to do away with her, Fleming makes a deal with the convicts he is supposedly trying to keep in line.

Continue reading “Tome by Ross Jeffery (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”

Lori, an aspiring true crime writer, is engaged in correspondence with a convicted serial killer named Edmund Cox. Ostensibly she hopes to wring a book deal out of her communications with the murderer, but her interest in Cox is far more than merely professional, as she feels a deep emotional bond with him: “In conversations with those who took life, Lori no longer felt dead inside. Killers, of all people, made her feel alive.” She even visits him in prison, where he makes a peculiar request. He asks her to visit an old hideout of his – a riverside shack never traced by the authorities – where she will find a key. This, Cox explains, she must take to The River Man. He gives no more information about this personage: no proper name, no address, no explanation as to what he would want with the key. All he says is that, if Lori follows his directions, she and The River Man shall meet.

Devoted to the serial killer, Lori agrees to carry out this strange task. Against her wishes, however, she is accompanied on the journey by her sister Abby. Although the elder of the two, Abby has a mental handicap brought on by a childhood injury and requires Lori as a caregiver; the very notion of being left alone sends Abby into a fit, prompting Lori to take her along after all. More interested in cartoons and musicals than the news or true crime books, Abby has no idea of Edmund’s crimes: to her, he is simply her sister’s boyfriend. As for the identity of The River Man, meanwhile, both sisters are in the dark – until they finally meet him.

Gone to See the River Man is one of three books by Kristopher Triana to appear on the 2021 Splatterpunk Award ballot (see also Blood Relations and They All Died Screaming) and once again, it is built around the core theme of warped relationships Protagonist Lori forms the trunk of an entire family tree of relationships gone wrong: as the novel unfolds, her crush on a convicted serial killer turns out to be comparatively normal.

Continue reading “Gone to See the River Man by Kristopher Triana (2021 Splatterpunk Awards)”