Mike Ashbrook is struggling in life: his wife divorced him, he boss fired him, and his two daughters – one a teenager, the other approaching that point – are growing away from him. He has to find new work, not an easy task as a 45-year-old with no collage degree. He settles for becoming a janitor, and even then he draws the shortest straw: his new job involves cleaning up human remains. Picking out the shattered skull fragments of a man who committed suicide with a gun to his mouth, mopping up the blood of murder victims – all in a day’s work for Mike.
But things take a more positive turn when Mike meets his new co-worker: a beautiful young woman named Sage (“She looked like she should be selling lingerie, not filling up blood buckets”). At first, Mike believes that the gruesome task will be too much for her, especially given that their first job together is in a bedroom where two children were brutally murdered. But to his surprise and dismay, Sage finds the prospect utterly exciting: “She sounded like a kid seeing Star Wars for the first time. There was no shock or disgust, no horror, only childlike wonder.”
Continue reading “Toxic Love by Kristopher Triana (2020 Splatterpunk Awards)”
As I type this, I’ve recently returned from my first trip to my local comics shop since the lockdown began. It was a five-mile walk there and back in 29 degrees so I’m a little puffed, but boy does it feel good to regain some semblance of the antediluvian ways.
More than twenty years ago, a group of devil-worshippers led by a man claiming descent from Aleister Crowely performed a human sacrifice in the name of their dark god Asmodeus. Decades later, teenage friends Mandi, Anna and Krystal – accompanied by Danny, maladjusted nephew of Mandi’s old parapsychology professor – head to the coven’s stomping ground of Killdeer Lake. Unaware of the area’s dark history (the local nickname of Killer Lake is merely surfer-dude slang, they are assured) the girls hope to spend time with a bevy of sexy and wealthy young men.
The New Flesh: A Literary Tribute to David Cronenberg is an anthology themed around (but not officially endorsed by) the director whose oeuvre includes the likes of Videodrome, Scanners, Rabid, Crash and eXistenZ. None of the stories are adaptations in the literal sense, but all draw inspiration from Cronenberg’s recurring motifs.