splatterpunk

atthequillsmercy

Lenni Reviews – Challenge Edition: “Son of the Slob” by Aron Beauregard

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*Trigger warning for gore, sexual assault, necrophilia, pedophilia, and general grossness.

After surviving her vicious attack, Vera is struggling to put her life back together. Her marriage is on the rocks, her home is a mess, and she struggles to find work due to how badly her face was mutilated. And what’s worse, the son she gave birth to may be more like his twisted sire than she’d realized.

I guess it’s meant to be ironic to start the blurb for the book with “Vera Harlow is a survivor,” only to spend the book destroying this woman all over again. While I expect the blood, guts, and excrement, it was the hopelessness that soured me to this book. Even Playground had a glimmer of hope and a cathartic ending. The writing makes you wince at the disgusting events – as it should – so, I can’t fault the skills here but, yeah. I didn’t enjoy this one simply because of how Vera’s story ends. 2 out of 5.

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Lenni Reviews Challenge Edition: “The Groomer” by Jon Athan

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Andrew McCarthy and his wife, Holly, have a typical life with their kids, Max and Grace. That is, until they notice a man named Zachary sniffing around, and Grace goes missing. Frustrated with the police, Andrew embarks on his own violent mission to find his daughter.

Well… Overall, this is Taken, but if we spent more time on the most awful parts of human trafficking, torture, murder, and snuff (trigger warnings for all of that, by the way). We don’t get the catharsis of a “win” after going through all this darkness; just bitter emptiness. A family is destroyed, and all the revenge gore in the world won’t make the demented fruits of these monsters go away. It’s just a downer, especially with what’s going on in the world now (perhaps that impacted my experience). Even if it’s not the perfect ending where everything is fine, there could have been some kind of hope at the end. The writing is fine, the descriptions of violence are visceral and real, but I can’t say I enjoyed this. 2 out of 5.

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Lenni Reviews Challenge Edition: “The Slob” by Aron Beauregard

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*This book is recommended for mature readers. Trigger warning for murder, gore, and rape.

While Vera grew up in a hoarder’s house with her parents and mentally unwell sister, she now lives with her disabled veteran husband, Daniel. With a baby on the way, Vera decides to become a door-to-door vacuum salesperson for some extra cash until she knocks on the door to the wrong house.

I understand this was meant to be extreme, and it succeeds in that the descriptions of the Slob and his home are gross and the sexual violence is disgusting, but this felt try-hard. I couldn’t get into it like I could with Playground or Tender is the Flesh. It’s as if there was a checklist of “Gross Stuff” and every other sentence was about ticking a box off. There’s even this random bit about some gay guys who kill people, as if the checklist included “People We Need to Offend” and overall, I feel cheated that I didn’t feel what I think the book was trying to get me to feel. I do have to say, Vera is a great character. I’m not sure if I’m becoming desensitized to all this, but in the end, it was a giant “Meh.” 1 out of 5.

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Lenni Reviews – Challenge Edition: “100% Match” by Patrick C. Harrison III

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*This book is intended for mature readers only.

At 30 years old, Bart is looking for his perfect woman, a match for him in every way, and is obsessed with the statistics around what women want. But with a dead-end job, rotund bod,y and suspect habits, how would he find such a woman?

The horror comes from Bart’s proclivity for contaminating customers’ food at his fast food job and murder. My first complaint is the physical book:

This story was originally part of an anthology, and as you can see in comparison to my hand, it’s really small. I am shocked I was able to get this, as in my professional librarian’s opinion, books like this are a shelving nightmare. I expect them to vanish either by being stolen or lost among the regular-sized materials.  What does this have to do with the content? Nothing, I walk about what I want. Deal with it. If the author wanted this as a physical copy on its own, I don’t see any better way of doing it other than a pamphlet or holding on to it until you write a bunch of other stories to pad things out to a regular-ish sized book. This is a very mild complaint, and I don’t hold it against the story itself.

Reading this gave me the same sort of feeling I had when I watched August Underground, only this was significantly less boring. The same casual tone used when speaking of his normal actions, Bart uses with the obscene acts he commits. It’s not poorly written, and the twist ending gave me a chuckle, but overall, this was just an okay read. 2.5 out of 5.

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Lenni Reviews – Challenge Edition: “Cows” by Matthew Stokoe

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*Trigger warnings for gore, sexual assault (of people and animals), and fecal eating, animal death, child death.

25-year-old Steve lives in poverty with his mother, who he affectionately calls The Hagbeast, and his dog named Dog. With dreams of a life like the shows he sees on TV, he starts a new job at a slaughterhouse where he quickly discovers it’s no ordinary place to work.

What is with these “extreme” books and poop-eating? And describing lady parts as smelling like fish? Is it a trope to just go for the easiest gross-out content (I can’t really say “humor” because it’s not funny) because I think the gore and animal fucking were plenty to accomplish that. There are obvious themes about the cycle of abuse and institutionalized abuse because I got the feeling in the slaughterhouse scenes that it was expected to do such out of pocket things to your coworkers and the cows while on the job. It’s normal to the men in the slaughterhouse to drill holes into a living cow and use it as a disgusting Flesh Light but Steve has to be initiated; taught that this is a normal thing.  Also, ew. Overall, this is not about Steve triumphing over this cycle. It’s a gross book with a depressing ending that didn’t even give me the feeling of horrid beauty that Tender is the Flesh did. Is it silly to expect more than just over-the-top gross stuff and have more meat (no pun intended) to these types of books? 2 out of 5.

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