books

Three Family Portraits by Matt Henshaw

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Matt Henshaw provides us with a rather unique series of snapshots, showcasing a dysfunctional family at three different stages. The parents are awful, disgusting, and happier apart. As it turns out, they receive a child that almost perfectly resembles the state of their relationship and the household he’ll soon be joining.
We begin with the premature birth of Mother and Father’s new son, as labor begins during Mother’s shift waitressing at the diner. Father, unfaithful and almost certain the child isn’t his, finally arrives in the delivery room to witness the excruciating birth of a child neither parent could have anticipated.
We skip forward eighteen months for our next glimpse of the family trio, witnessing further descent into chaos. While they’ve been blessed with something that is not the child they expected, Mother insists on struggling to do her best while Father distances himself to a greater extent.
Skipping forward one final time, we are treated to something repulsive and insane, a household fully descended into madness, filth, and decay. You’ll have to read it for yourself if you want to know more. I can’t tell you anything else because sharing any further details would spoil the whole experience.
Henshaw hits us with a raw and visceral nightmare of parenthood. Tapping into something I think might be more common than a lot of people think, he paints us a textual portrait of the fears and terrors that plague all new parents as they await the birth of their first child, or maybe every child, taken to an extreme that leaves the reader repulsed.

This title is part of the http://www.godless.com 31 Days of Godless event, released on October 24th, 2021. You can obtain it for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the app to your mobile device of choice. The link is below:

Three Family Portraits by Matt Henshaw – OCTOBER 24th

Dissing D*sney by Matt Shaw

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It pleased me a great deal to see another author, one I respect a great deal, deciding that it was worthwhile to focus on Disney as a target for extreme, unpleasant literature.
Matt Shaw dedicates his exceptional talent and delicious wit to providing the reader with horrific, unsettling epilogues to well-known tales previously co-opted by Disney and watered down for children. In a sense, it feels almost as though Shaw is restoring a sort of balance by bringing the darkness and sardonic wit to stories that were largely rather dark before Disney got ahold of them.
I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, but just the act of sharing which story connects with which fairytale property will, in some cases, spoil some surprises. I want to be sure you take that into consideration before you read beyond this point.
The escapades of Prince Charming with a series of princesses begin to seem reminiscent of Henry VIII in the stories Happy Ever After, Glass, and Bloods. I was especially pleased with Happy Ever After, in that it went the direction I anticipated it would go by the end. It’s nice to know there’s a writer out there with the key to my perverse, cruel heart.
The Toy Maker paints a picture of kindly old Gepetto that would disturb any fan of Pinocchio.
A Dinner Date provides us with the natural outcome one might expect for the characters of Bambi.
Wonderland shows us a terrible fate befalling Alice in her desperate search for Wonderland.
Grief brings the story of Nemo to a close, teaching an important lesson to a child along the way.
The Lion King is concluded with a truly ignoble end with Selfie.
The Harsh Truth shares The Little Mermaid meeting her end.
Finally, The Biggest brings a close to this collection as well as the story of The Jungle Book.
If you’re looking to ruin your childhood in retrospect, this is the collection for you. This is the end of innocence, the graphic and bleak punctuation that closes the book on the comforting tales that brought vibrant, technicolor characters to your youth.

Dissing D*sney was released as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com for October of 2021. For a limited time, you can obtain this for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the app to your preferred mobile device. The link is below:

Dissing Disney by Matt Shaw

Ejaculate Of the Incubus by The Professor

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Oh dear me, Professor, dear me.
I began Ejaculate of the Incubus with high expectations brought on by the, quite frankly, stellar performance during KillerCon 2021 of a separate, though no less graphic and revolting tale. As you can probably ascertain, I was most assuredly not disappointed.
This lovely tale starts as an unnamed narrator meets with an old friend, Professor Roberts, for tea. Anticipating some minor transformation resulting from Roberts returning from his recent honeymoon, our narrator is taken aback by a far more startling and peculiar metamorphosis having taken place. A prim and proper, detached and naive gentleman no more, Roberts displays a wild-eyed intensity and disheveled condition as he begins to recount recent events.
It was the honeymoon between Roberts and his bride, Lily, at an old monastery on the Sussex coast, that led them to discover a peculiar metallic object buried in the sand. Returning to their lodging, they caught a glimpse of a strangely proportioned man emerging from the surf, and they hurried to the security of human habitation. Upon inspection of their discovered object, Roberts discerned graphic depictions etched onto the surface that shocked his puritanical sensibilities.
This is where the story truly blossoms into something altogether peculiar, blending eroticism and revulsion into a dizzying melange of fluids both human and infernal.
The author, publishing under the nom de plume of The Professor, provides us with a deliciously vile story that lends sophisticated use of language and eloquence to acts of sexual depravity one typically finds when perusing the Urban Dictionary or Reddit forums. To say that I was impressed would be an understatement. I knew to expect something magnificent from this author, and I was still blown away.
The audio narration of the same work, provided by the author, is a fantastic experience that adds a different nuance and enjoyment to the experience. I’ll be eagerly awaiting any new material from The Professor.

This title is available as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com for October of 2021. You can obtain this for yourself by going to the website or downloading the app for your mobile device. The link is below:

Ejaculate of the Incubus by The Professor

Aliens: Infiltrator by Weston Ochse, Narrated by Bronson Pinchot

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I don’t know when–or even if–I’ll have a chance to play Aliens: Fireteam, but listening to the audiobook for Weston Ochse’s Aliens: Infiltrator certainly sets the stage for a fascinating and original action/horror gaming experience. If I never get around to playing the game, it won’t be for lack of interest, and it certainly won’t be due to this book disappointing me.
The protagonist, Dr. Hoenikker, serves as a cipher of sorts, the lens through which we experience the introduction to the Weyland-Yutani scientific facility. While there’s ample character development across the board, Hoenikker being the newest member of the scientific team provides us with a great opportunity to experience everything through a fresh set of eyes. With his military experience, Ochse does a fantastic job bringing the supporting cast of characters to life, particularly the former Colonial Marines on staff at Pala Station.
With Murphy’s Law in full effect, Dr. Hoenikker joins the crew of Pala Station just as an infiltrator begins a campaign of corporate espionage. As with the real world, this relatively small trouble of spying and theft escalates in a cascade effect that explodes into an utter nightmare by the conclusion. Laboratory experiments go horribly wrong, communication breaks down, and everything falls apart.
Experimenting with what we’ve come to think of as the black goo from the Alien prequel films from Ridley Scott, we encounter some interesting and dangerous creatures produced from the local fauna, potentially more deadly than the Xenomorphs we’ve all come to know and love. This being an Alien novel, of course, there are Xenomorphs in the mix, and we get further exposure to how the black goo can modify the outcome of the genesis taking place.
Bronson Pinchot’s narration is sufficiently skilled that the characters almost always sound distinctly separate and discernable as individual actors in the narrative playing out. I especially enjoyed the performance for Rawlings, who I couldn’t help but picture as an African American Matthew McConaughey. The only instances where Pinchot’s narration failed was concerning female characters, but I’ve heard worse over time.

Curse of the Ratman by Jay Wilburn

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To set the stage for this story, the best I can think to suggest is that it’s a twisted abomination crafted by combining Willard (either the 1971 classic or the superior 2003 remake) with the Clive Barker story, “In the Hills, the Cities.” That doesn’t truly capture the sheer giant monster lunacy of what Wilburn’s created here, but it’ll whet the appetite and prepare the reader as best one can.
A family curse comes on with a vengeance, rampaging across the southeast, leaving a swath of devastation that can only be explained as a natural disaster. To call it an act of God would be to beg the question of what sort of God would allow such a monstrosity to exist.
The intense pacing of Wilburn’s tale propels us forward even as we want to turn back, knowing that nothing good can come of what he’s racing us toward.
If he’d written a novel, including more of the family history and details of the events in the distant past, I’d have gleefully settled in to read the whole thing. As captivating as the story gets, with the expanding threat thundering its way across the landscape, I would love to dive into the origins of the curse in greater detail. There’s a thoroughly fascinating story to be told, and maybe if we beg Wilburn enough–in the form of spreading the word of the Ratman–he’ll find himself compelled to share that part of the tale with us in similar detail.

This novella was released as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com and you can pick it up for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the app. The link is below:

Curse of the Ratman by Jay Wilburn

My Dildo Is a Serial Killer by Simon McHardy and Sean Hawker

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I’ve never looked at a dildo and mistaken it for a chest expander, but I’m not a priest, so there’s that. This is how Hawker and McHardy begin their novella, My Dildo Is a Serial Killer.
A priest opens a box containing what he believes to be exercise equipment, and insanity ensues. Of course, this mistake arises because someone who couldn’t spell “exorcism” delivered the box with the expectation that someone associated with the church would be able to remedy the problem with the giant purple dildo possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. His name is Terry.
Escaping from the exorcism performed by a couple of priests, Terry finds his way to Christina, a disgusting human being with potentially no redeeming qualities. She is the perfect tool for the fulfillment of Terry’s needs. It’s not totally her fault, though. Wait until you meet her parents because, as messed up as Christina happens to be, there’s no doubt they played a key role in nudging her along that path.
I’m not telling you anything more about this one. You have to experience it for yourself. The deaths are over-the-top and gruesome, the humor is dark and perverse, and the blistering pace keeps the reader raw and sore as McHardy and Hawker bestow us with a barrage of absurd, graphic, and hilarious events from beginning to climax.
These two are fantastic on their own. Combined, they craft a seamless narrative that captures the best of both worlds.

This title was released as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com for October of 2021. You can pick up a digital copy of this release by going to the website or by downloading the Godless app on your mobile device of choice.

My Dildo is a Serial Killer by Simon McHardy and Sean Hawker

Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove, Narrated by Dennis Kleinman

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James Lovegrove writes himself into the narrative with The Cthulhu Casebooks, in a fictionalized account of his own life in the preface to this tale. As a distant relation to the former H.P. Lovecraft, a parcel finds its way to him upon the passing of another member of the Lovecraft family.
Contained within is a trilogy of manuscripts penned by Dr. John Watson, confidant and partner of Sherlock Holmes. In the tale that unfolds, we learn that the meeting of Watson and Holmes did not transpire as we’ve come to believe. Additionally, further elements of Watson’s previously available documentation of the cases he and Holmes investigated have been fictionalized to protect the world from forbidden knowledge of things best left unknown.
From the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan to long-forgotten catacombs beneath London, a global tale of unspeakable horror emerges. Upon meeting one another, Holmes and Watson find themselves in pursuit of answers to a rash of ritualistic deaths occurring during the new moon. What they discover will leave the pair, as well as other familiar characters from the Holmes’ archives, changed in ways never hinted at within the released accounts from Watson.
All-in-all, this was a worthwhile mixture of the Lovecraftian mythos and the characters developed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The writing style emulates Doyle’s prose surprisingly well, and the insertion of creatures like Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu into the narrative was performed seamlessly. The story itself didn’t impress me quite as much as I’d hoped, but it was decent enough to nudge me toward checking out the additional two volumes in this series.
Dennis Kleinman’s narration of Watson was quite fantastic, as was his performance of Holmes’ dialogue. Sadly, the other characters felt perhaps a bit less set apart from the background. This is not to say that they weren’t distinct enough to tell them apart, because he managed that quite well, just that they weren’t brought to life in quite the same way the two protagonists were.

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Cthulhu-Casebooks-Sherlock-Holmes-and-the-Shadwell-Shadows-Audiobook/1094095028?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShare

Slaughter Box by Carver Pike

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Readers of Carver Pike’s Diablo Snuff books will have first met Kong in Passion & Pain, after his first encounter with the sinister organization. His torture at their hands drove him to seek any information he could find, only to discover they were like ghosts. Our next meeting with Kong is near the end of The Grindhouse, where he appears as a member of Psalm 71. A lot had clearly taken place between those points in time, and Slaughter Box provides us with a glimpse of that missing period of Kong’s life.
Still traumatized and emotionally damaged from his first experience with Diablo Snuff, Kong returns to his hometown where he finds a flier for the grand reopening of a local movie theater. Violating the trust of his childhood best friend, Kong invites that friend’s younger sister, Sammy, on a date. With the flier fresh in his mind, their venue is obvious.
Unfortunately, as the reader suspects, this is a trap.
William Castle, had he been a homicidal monster or a psychopath, would have fallen in love with the painstakingly engineered and hideously cruel alterations to the theater. Bringing the film to life in the most awful ways, Diablo Snuff intends to punish Kong for his persistent search.
I won’t spoil anything, but we know Kong makes it through the events of this book, but will anyone else survive the malicious and inhumane machinations of Diablo Snuff? You’ll have to read it for yourself if you want to find out.
Carver Pike does an excellent job of balancing high stakes, tense horror with more human elements of the story. We learn a great deal about Kong, his life before we first discovered him in that hellish warehouse, and the miserable life he’d been leading subsequent to his escape from the organization’s clutches. We get to know Sammy, and the deep affection between she and Kong is so well-crafted on the page as to feel as palpable and sincere as a relationship between two real people.
As one might expect, Pike manages to fill the pages with a fair amount of sex and smut, in addition to the violence. If you’ve read The Grindhouse–as you certainly should have–you’ll be well aware of what Diablo Snuff is capable of when they’ve got a movie projector available.
This is the penultimate Diablo Snuff book, leading the way into the (sure to be) intense conclusion, The Maddening. It’s been a long ride, getting here…but one cannot claim it hasn’t been enjoyable.

https://amzn.to/3ve3kvz

Firefly: Generations by Tim Lebbon, Narrated by James Anderson Foster

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Firefly: Generations begins with the story of a map. This star map changes hands many times, through treachery or happenstance, but this is no mere map, and those who take it into their possession seem to somehow recognize that fact without being fully conscious of it.
The truth of the map only reveals itself when it finds its way into the hands of River Tam, where hidden machinery embedded in the material activates. From there, we find ourselves following most of Serenity’s crew into the outer reaches of the verse, where deadly secrets await them amidst an awe-inspiring relic of the history before mankind reached their new homes on the planets and moons the Firefly crew is familiar with.
This novel falls somewhere after the prematurely canceled television series, though before Inara and Book had permanently left the crew and retired to the locations where we meet them again in the movie Serenity.
Tim Lebbon takes the helm in this fourth Firefly novel, telling us a story that fills in gaps in the mystery that is the life of River Tam, the secret experiments conducted by Alliance scientists, and the centuries-past journey from Earth that was. Generations is a far different tale than those contained in the three previous Firefly novels, focusing on the more science fiction elements of the property rather than on the land-based adventures of the crew. It’s a nice transition, receiving this glimpse into the less western-themed exploits of Serenity and the family that calls her home.
Foster’s narration seems only to be improving with each subsequent audiobook release. As he more firmly captures the nuances and patterns of speech for the individual characters, one could almost close their eyes and envision the cast playing their parts.

Alien Sex Fluids: Experiments 1 through 3 by Reekfeel

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Attempting to provide a traditional review of Reekfeel’s three Alien Sex Fluids titles would be to perform a disservice. It could be argued that this is simply me attempting to rationalize the fact that I am in no way capable of properly reviewing the material contained within these shorts.
Packed with a sort of free association or stream of consciousness writing that more accurately resembles poetry than narrative prose, Reekfeel’s Alien Sex Fluids plays fast and loose with both language and structure. One almost has simply to let the words–the sounds and visual elements implicit in those words–flow over and around them, dragging the reader along through the cacophony of it all.
The free-flowing, anti-literature qualities are most pronounced in Alien Sex Fluids: Experiment 1, where we’re introduced to Nyarlathotep of Lovecraftian fame, and reinterpreted by the author. This is not the being/creature/god as good ol’ Howard Philips wrote it, but rather a mischievous and whimsically cruel thing prone to juvenile outbursts and toilet humor.
We are also introduced to the beings/people ostensibly conducting the experiments–or are they the subjects of the experiments?–named after various elements of the periodic table. We’ll get to know them in greater detail in further installments of the series.
Reekfeel also takes this time to introduce us to the inhabitants of the garden, strange, child-like creatures without discernable form or function as we perceive it. There’s no conceivable way I could describe the activities during that interlude, and you’ll have to read it for yourself if you want to better understand what I mean.
Alien Sex Fluids: Experiment 2 takes on a more prose-like structure in part, diving more into the narrative elements of the overall story being constructed/deconstructed by Reekfeel. We focus more strongly on Selenium, and it’s a strange reversal of norms that the revelation of a dream is more coherently literary than the surrounding material.
In Alien Sex Fluids: Experiment 3, we get to witness Reekfeel inserting themself into the narrative in a rather tongue-in-cheek sense, providing a sort of halfhearted apology for how challenging it is to follow along with dialogue from Bismuth as an RPG of some kind is being played to assist Selenium(?). Of course, this only serves to upset Nyarlathotep, who is sharing this story with us through Reekfeel as a conduit.
I’d like to say that Experiment 3 continues the more coherent aspects of the narrative as we’d experienced in Experiment 2, but I’d be lying to you, and I’m not a liar! The vast majority of this installment of the series takes place within and is focused around the role-playing taking place, and Reekfeel’s attempt to clear up the mess of multiple dialogues only serves to make it all more of a mess.
It’s virtually impossible, as you might understand, to provide a proper review of Alien Sex Fluids, but it’s worth taking the time to dive into the tumultuous, disorganized, yet strangely calculated and lunatic-by-design story you’ll witness unfolding. This is, after all, something being conveyed to us, through Reekfeel, by the crawling chaos itself. If it weren’t indicative of madness, it wouldn’t be authentic. One thing I can say for sure, there’s a certain brilliance and creative imagination impossible to ignore in the distorted, untethered, insanity of Reekfeel’s work.

Experiment 3 was released as part of the 31 Days of Godless event over at http://www.godless.com You can pick up all three installments of Alien Sex Fluids by going to the website or by downloading the app to your preferred mobile device. The links to the three current volumes are below:

Alien Sex Fluids: Experiment 1 by REEKFEEL
Alien Sex Fluids: Experiment 2 by REEKFEEL
Alien Sex Fluids: Experiment 3 by REEKFEEL