Siege on Dome 17 By Nick Young

Siege on Dome 17
By Nick Young
2024 White Mountain Pub.
Paperback, 239 pages

    This is Young’s debut novel and it’s fair to say that he’s off to a fairly auspicious start. The many characters’ (some are super unsavory) actions all have an effect on each other in one way or another and the story is multi-faceted, but that’s not to say that Young doesn’t know what we’re here for. Gore and bodily fluids flow and splash aplenty. Blood, plasma, claret, urine, vomit, pus, jizz and entrails leave bodies in every chapter… and there are 41 chapters!

    Ten years have passed since the bombs dropped and the world is a dead, radiated desert and the surviving humans live in steel domes. Dome 17 may well be the last dome with anyone alive. Some remaining humans have become mutants, covered with boils and pus-filled sacs who become crazier over time. Taft is the man in charge of killing the mutants once they lose their humanity. A shitty job indeed. Three housing blocks are in Dome 17 and the A-block is all mutants. The survivors are running out of everything and things are breaking down, including the dome’s retracting roof. It’s turning into a war between the humans and the A-block and things are about to get even worse.

    Giant insects are getting into the dome and the car-sized ants and huge wasps don’t care who they’re killing and eating. One vengeful mutant is feeding victims to a massive spider. The humans have to find a way to curb the insects and the mutants and save their asses, but the rag-tag team of heroes seem like a very unlikely crew to handle the siege. Descriptive violence ensues and the viscera is knee-deep in no time. As with the 80’s pulp horrors that this book is inspired by, inappropriate sex is also graphically depicted.

    Young has a ton of fun with his killings, with guts sliding out of impaled bodies and the above-mentioned fluids spraying far and wide. The characters include a pedo/ child-murdering reverend, a mourning mom, a German co-worker of Taft’s that I pictured looking like Ted V. Mikels, a useless, dog-killing Dome Mayor, a mutant with revenge on his mind, the mayor’s very capable wife who become Taft’s main squeeze, and a plethora of folks, both good and bad, who are trying to survive. They are all worthwhile characters that help push the story along.

    As with most small press books, it could have used another pass by an editor. A character named Arthur become Albert after a few pages and there are some typos throughout but overall, in that respect, this book is in better shape than 90% of the self-published/ small press books that I encounter. Young sent me a review copy with a barf-bag that he thoughtfully included as a bookmark. I didn’t have to use it but I can see where some might! The splatter is heavy, the gore is plentiful and the sick bastards that live in this book just might make you puke! On a side note, I wonder if Young’s idea for the domes came from Skydome in Toronto.

                                              It's a barf-bag! It's a bookmark! It's a barf-bag bookmark!!

Talia By Daniel J. Volpe

Talia
By Daniel J. Volpe
2021 Self-published
Paperback, 211 pages

 

Blood makes the best lube!

                Evidently, Talia is a prequel to Volpe’s 2020 book Billy Silver, but I didn’t know that going in and it certainly made no difference to me, the reader. If you haven’t read that one yet, you’re still good to go.

                Talia is a midwestern gal transplanted in New York searching for fame in the bright lights of the big city. Well, she finds fame (of a sort) after being taken under the wing of Mike (never a name one should trust!), an underground specialty pornographer. She performs her jaw-dropping sleaze on camera for Mike and his psycho henchman Sally with no complaints until it gets bloody. Y’see, Mike has started to make snuff-porn. And if you don’t like it, Sally’s razor has something to say.

                Volpe lays the sleaze on thick and the fluids and depravity flood from the pages. The porn is gratuitous as fuck but we’re not reading Bambi here, kids… this is Splatterpunk Supreme. I mean, the first line in the book is “The strap-on dildo was nearly the size of a fire extinguisher”. Not just blood is splattering here, either. Once it does, however, the story became a lot more interesting for me. In my horror eyes, blood > cum.

                Admittedly, with little backstory on Talia (maybe there is some in the previous book), she sure seemed to get into the swing of things in the heavy-porn scene for such an innocent farm-girl. But she is badass and after a run-in with Sally, she gets even more violent. The book takes a supernatural turn that leaves the pages dripping with gore and satisfying revenge.

                Talia is filled with various bodily fluids, rape, murder, torture, gore, and nihilism… just exactly what you want when reading an extreme horror book. This one can be torn through in a sitting or two. Volpe is a heck of a nice guy in person but has one fucked up and twisted imagination. Soon to be a certified National Treasure.

                This edition has a nice, eye-catching cover by Mr. Michael Squid.

The Slob By Aron Beauregard

The Slob
By Aron Beauregard
2019 Maggot Press
Paperback, 128 pages

 

                This book gets a lot of mentions on the Horror Books and Splatterpunks Facebook pages and naturally, that caught my attention. I like to indulge in the extreme stuff and this one was supposed to be way out there. Imagine my delight when I was walking through a local Horror Con and unbeknownst to me, Aron Beauregard was there! I bought a few books from him (and Daniel Volpe), ready to bust my AB cherry. He seemed like such a nice young man.

 

                Having grown up in a squalid setting, Vera became a neat freak, always cleaning to overcome the filth of her childhood. Life hadn’t been easy, but she eventually persevered, married her (disabled) husband and was pregnant with their first child. For extra cash, she became a door-to-door vacuum salesperson and business was booming. In her second trimester, she knew she’d have to give up the job. But just one more day… one more sale…

 

                Then, she rang The Slob’s doorbell. And her life went to hell.

 

                Beauregard is a hell of a good writer, and this book is much more than an extreme horror gross-out. Vera is a fully developed character, flawed (as we all are) and very relatable and I really became attached to her. That is why, halfway through the book, I got the biggest sucker punch in the gut since I read Let’s Go Play at the Adams’. From the point she gets to The Slob’s house till the end of the book, it is pure nightmare.

 

                The Slob is full of horrific violence, various bodily fluids, rape, dismemberment, humiliation, and every sordid action you can (and could never) imagine. Then why do I heartily recommend it? Because it is compelling, very well written and, well yeah… gross as fuck. Not many books make me wake up in the night feeling nervous and lousy, thinking of the protagonist. This one did.

 

                This edition has a lovely cover and interior art by Anton Rosovsky.

 

                And he seemed like a nice young man.

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Killstreme By Rayne Havok

 

Killstreme
By Rayne Havok
Self-published, 2020/21
Paperback, 80 pages

 

                This book (and author) came to my attention when I heard that Amazon had banned a few extreme horror books, this one included. Naturally, I immediately wanted to support this book and author, so I put it on my wish-list and kept checking back to see if it was still “unavailable”. Eventually, sanity prevailed, and the book was again for sale on that billionaire’s website. I bought it.

 

                A slender volume, it is. Just over 70 pages of story, double-spaced; it would be about a 30-page story in a normal anthology. But that doesn’t bother me. I like ‘em short. And sweet. And violent. I’ll admit that got a little nervous when I started the story; as with many self-published efforts, a good proof-reading was needed. The first chapter is a mess of punctuation and sentence structure errors, but as the story went on, I either stopped noticing or they weren’t present.

 

                But that’s just the editor in me. Story-wise, this is loads of fun. A sick fuck gets a chance to make his own snuff film. He goes to a secluded film-site and begins his torture/ murder in the vilest ways imaginable. And then the tables turn…

 

                Havok gleefully describes painful torture on the male anatomy and I fucking love it. After so much misogyny in the genre, it’s nice to see uncompromising male genital torture. Read ‘em and weep, fellas. The extremity and over-the-top violence were obviously a lot of fun to write and it sure is fun to read.

 

                I will definitely look into her other work, but I will also hope that she hooks up with a worthwhile proofreader/ editor. Her great ideas deserve to be properly presented.

               

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Dead Inside By Chandler Morrison

 

Dead Inside
By Chandler Morrison
2020 Death’s Head Press
Made-to-order Paperback, 162 pages

 

    This book got a lot of comments on the Books of Horror Facebook page and it piqued my interest. Disgusting, vile, sickening, “I had to put it down”… it almost seemed like a challenge. When I saw it had a necrophiliac character, I happily put it into my Amazon basket.

 

    The main character, a hospital security guard, is indeed a necrophile. His morgue visits were more than just doing his rounds. He eventually meets a maternity doctor, a woman who enjoys eating abortions. He finds out her secret and an oddball romance ensues. That’s right; Dead Inside is a romantic story, and a pretty goddamn funny one, too.

 

    Yes, it’s gross for grossness’s sake, but there is a wicked sense of humor throughout. Told in first person in the security guard’s voice, his bleak outlook of the world and his casual acceptance of what he is drives the narrative and makes for quite a few chuckles. Sure, there is explicit corpse fucking, fetus eating, combinations of the two, skull fucking, slime, ooze, ejaculate and nihilism, but somehow, I could understand the guard’s motives and I’ll be damned if I didn’t agree with some of his thoughts.

 

    Dead Inside is extremely well written and engaging, once you accept the fact that it is an extreme horror book that aims to shock. But shock isn’t the main objective, I don’t think. I’ll be looking for more of Morrison’s books. This one was good. Unlike any other romance novel you have ever read.

This review originally appeared in Midnight Magazine #9, March, 2022.

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Cows By Matthew Stokoe

 Cows

By Matthew Stokoe

Made on Demand, 1997/ 2015

Paperback, 206 pages

 

                This is the notorious, gross-out, disgusting novel that has all the kids a’ twitter about how nasty it is. When online discussions about the “most extreme” horror novels pop up, Cows is sure to get a mention. Needless to say, I needed to take the plunge and shell out my hard earned dough.

 

                Steven is a fucked-up guy. His unloving mother (The Hagbeast) routinely abuses him, and he longs for the “real”, happy family life he sees on TV. He gets a job in a slaughterhouse, his first move towards independence, and it fucks him up even more. Soon, a group of rogue cows that have escaped the kill-line are talking to him and indoctrinating him into their underground society, hoping he can help with their cause.

 

Yeah, that’s right. Talking cows. On the surface, it’s just more wackiness in a book that has more shit, vomit, blood, jizz, and other bodily fluids than every other book ever written combined, but it’s all just allegory, and it does get a tad heavy handed at times. Not to say that it doesn’t work, though. The world (and our place in it) is a mess and Stokoe does a masterful job of showing just how bad it could be for some folks. Granted, I’m not going to shit down my mother’s throat to kill her, but I do feel a little alienated sometimes.

 

Is the book a gross-out? Oh, hell yes! Has Stokoe actually eaten shit? Because he goes into great detail about the texture, taste and viscosity of feces that will have your brow furrowing at the very least. His descriptions of the desolate world of Steven filled me with his hopelessness and, as a veggie, the slaughterhouse scenes reinforced my choice of a meatless lifestyle in a massive way. Yes, the book is a gross-out, but it is a hell of a lot more than that. It will make you think about things you’d rather not think about. I made me squirm, laugh, roll my eyes and think. It’s actually quite a deep book.

 

First published in 1998 by Creation Books, Cows is now self-published by Matthew Stokoe.

This review originally appeared in Midnight Magazine #9, March 2022.

 

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