Shane is a fighter, and he might be a big deal in his home of Australia, but he just experienced a humiliating defeat in Thailand. Bitter about his loss yet emboldened by a sense of entitlement, he discovers the perfect tattoo to commemorate his twenty-first birthday. From the wall of the tattoo parlor, Shane selects an image of the beautiful deity, Nang Tani. He demands that the artist perform the work against the old monk’s reservations, and ultimately gets more than he asked for. Unfortunately for Shane, one does not select her; she selects them. Shane and his best friend, Paul, are terrible young men. Racist, homophobic, womanizing, and prone to violence, the curse couldn’t have befallen a more suitable victim than Shane. Lee Franklin doesn’t skimp on the violence, brutality, and gore in Nang Tani. Nor does she refrain from bringing the characters to life by pulling no punches concerning their attitudes toward–and treatment of–the Thai locals and everyone else around them. This refusal to self-censor certainly helps Franklin to impart a great deal more authenticity to the interactions than might otherwise have been possible. There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing these two Australians suffering, but that’s only the beginning because Nang Tani has plans for Shane, and he’ll fulfill them whether he likes it or not.
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INXS picks up right where the first Platinum Blondes concluded, though we’re first introduced to Tony and provided with awful glimpses into a childhood from which no one would walk away undamaged. As much sympathy as we might have for the young boy, he quickly erodes that goodwill as we get to know him further, and especially the man he’s become. It similarly doesn’t take long to discover that Tony is no stranger to Tina, the protagonist we became achingly familiar with during the first installment. The tangled web of connections and intrigue doesn’t end there, and the reader’s exposed to new revelations that paint everything we’ve read before in a different light. Previous sentiments have to be adjusted as new facts become available and more details become clear. We also learn more about Gwen and Patricia Tobin, the Platinum Blondes orchestrating everything and manipulating the protagonists to achieve their sinister goals. Unfortunately, the more we learn about the two women operating The Platinum Blondes Agency, the more questionable everything becomes, including their judgment. Todd Love answers questions we had from the first story in this series while providing us with all new questions to be answered in future installments. He leaves us wanting for more but satisfied for the time being. Violence batters the reader from almost every page, and the story is positively soaked with blood, semen, and other fluids. Monsters elicit sympathy as we witness their development, and those who initially seemed like victims begin to appear more like monsters themselves. In all of this, Love reminds us to leave our preconceptions at the door when we enter The Platinum Blonde Agency.
You can obtain a copy of this story for yourself by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app to your preferred mobile device. The link is below:
For “Snowflake,” there’s perhaps no greater torture than performing as a Christmas elf at the mall. Understandably, she’d feel that way, from the pedophile Santa to the grimy, screaming children. It doesn’t get much worse than that. Except for maybe being subjected to a hot box apartment with no air conditioning, a bare trickle of water pressure, and an elderly neighbor who listens to her television far too loud for anyone not hard of hearing. She’s got problems, but it’s about to get more interesting. She’s about to make them your problems instead. With irreverence and humor, Lindsay Crook assaults the hyper-commercialized Christmas holiday. She also sets her sights on inconsiderate neighbors, annoying coworkers, perverts, and Karens through the proxy of her protagonist, exhibiting knee-jerk reactions of violence that every reader is sure to relate to. How much chaos can one Christmas elf cause in the week before Christmas? You might be surprised. As with the previous Manic story, Crook manages to hit on topics from misogyny to miserable workplace conditions, while also attacking the seeming ubiquitousness of perverse male behavior, from the security guard to the mall Santa. Sure, it’s a fun romp as well, but there’s a whole lot of uncomfortable truth in this story as well.
This story was released as part of the AntiChristmas event at http://www.godless.com for December of 2021. You can pick it up for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the app to your mobile device. The link is below:
Is there a more horrible occupational combination of thankless and stressful than working in fast food? Probably not. For the protagonist of Lindsay Crook’s Manic, life at Bill’s Burger Barn is one endless flow of disrespectful customers, sleazy bosses, and revolting working conditions. It’s enough to drive anyone mad. But maybe, if her personal life weren’t also in shambles, she could hold herself together past Wednesday. That’s a big maybe, though. It’s going to be a long week, but she’s going to make it everyone else’s problem if she has her way. One can hardly blame her when the universe seems to set things up just right. Crook is making poverty and impulse control issues sexy again. Wait, were those things ever sexy in the first place? I’m sure they were. I’m going to let it ride. Crook is bringing sexy back in a big way! Lindsay Crook fills these few pages with plenty of violence, biological warfare in the form of toxic food treatment, and even more violence. There’s more than that, though. At the core, this is a story that showcases how unutterably awful life can be for women because, as much a caricature as Manic might be, it’s probably not far off from the average week for altogether too many women. The world might be a better place if those women finally had enough, just like this protagonist did. Of course, it would be a better place if people just behaved better in the first place, but that might be asking a bit too much. Crook also manages to capture the stress and hopelessness that goes hand-in-hand with poverty-level existence and working demeaning, demoralizing jobs, only to barely make ends meet.
You can pick up a copy of Manic by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app to your mobile device of choice. The link is below:
The Breed begins with Theo seeking refuge, hoping for nothing more than to use a phone to call his mother, his bike broken down in the rain. When he knocks at the door of Cullis House, his belief that he’s found a refuge is short-lived. Ericmore leaps ahead a matter of decades and we join two friends hoping to stay at Cullis House in the middle of their backpacking trip. Sore feet and the attention of a sleazy guest already in attendance are soon the least of their concerns. This story could be adapted to serve as a Hellraiser sequel with only minimal alteration required. One needs only think of the house in place of the Lament Configuration. Ericmore crafts a grotesque, sexually-charged nightmare that even Barker would be hard-pressed to deny as a suitable abbatoir for his playthings to explore.
Distinctly I Remember further cements The Professor as the master of what can only be described as splattergothic literature. Even if he had any peers in this genre, they would be hard-pressed to approach the passionate embrace of topics considered taboo and the literary flair with which he delves into the depths of perversions that are both titillating and revolting. In this story, the influence of Poe is unabashedly on display, blending elements of The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher into a tale of deeper darkness and depravity than Edgar Allan Poe would have dared document. Twins, a brother and sister, secluded and kept in isolation, become victims of the hallucinatory madness and obsession growing increasingly profound within the young man. The incestuous relationships and compulsions, often writ as subtext by traditional Gothic writers, come to the forefront with The Professor’s ministrations…and the story is all the better for that brazen lack of subtlety. As events unfold before us, we stare with rapt attention as a thing of beauty is systematically destroyed by the very admirer of that exquisite object of the narrator’s obsession.
This story was released as part of the AntiChristmas event at http://www.godless.com for December of 2021. You can pick it up for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the Godless app to your device of choice. The link is below:
The release of Kristopher Triana’s And the Devil Cried is one of those examples of strangely serendipitous timing. It serves as an odd juxtaposition with Stephen King’s Billy Summers. Both stories are about men who became involved with organized crime after committing a murder during their youth and enlisting with the military. That is, of course, where the similarities end, as the characters themselves couldn’t be more different. Triana excels in crafting unlikeable characters. His true skill is in developing these characters who manage to be entirely captivating precisely because of how unlikeable they are. Jackie is a prime example of that. Committing his first murder at the age of 17 for no better reason than greed and bitterness over the good fortune of the victim, Jackie never strives to be a better person. After his time in the Army, Jackie never adjusts to civilian life, and he gets arrested for an attempted armed robbery. The story picks up as he’s being released and reacquainting himself with bad people he met while on the inside. As the story unfolds, you find yourself wishing he’d never been released, but there wouldn’t be much of a book if that were the case. Misogynistic, abusive, sexist, violent, bigoted, and fundamentally heartless, there’s not much about Jackie that resembles a human being, and that’s what makes him an excellent protagonist for this particular story. While this isn’t one of Triana’s extreme horror or splatterpunk tales, he brings those sensibilities to the pulp crime genre with a character so devoid of decency that he’s almost a caricature of what one might expect a hardened criminal to be. There are components of this story that are difficult to read. I’d suggest those are notably Jackie’s treatment of homosexuals in prison and his unabashed fixation on young girls, but it’s worth sticking it out to the end. Triana showcases a talent for writing hardboiled pulp crime that transcends the genre conventions. It’s a little bit Scarface, a little bit The Godfather, and all Triana. While it’s not my favorite of his books, it’s well worth reading and it displays a side of Triana as an author that I’d never witnessed previously. It’s encouraging to see him stepping outside of his comfort zone and exploring new ground, and that makes me curious about what he’ll have in store for us next.
The story begins with tightropes and titties, as Perry and his best friend, Devin, enjoy a vacation in a small Mexican town alongside college students from all over America–and the rest of the world. Their enjoyment doesn’t last long, as Diablo Snuff has plans for the revelers, at least the ones they find attractive enough to press-gang into the same sort of service Kong and Nick “Lucky” Luciano were providing in Passion & Pain. If you haven’t read Passion & Pain, hopefully, you’ve read A Foreign Evil, The Grind House, and Slaughter Box. You should still have some idea what I’m talking about if you’ve at least read those three. Personally, I recommend going back and reading both Passion & Pain and Grad Night as well, because they all come together in the pages of The Maddening. It’s wrong to say this story begins with tightropes and titties. It all begins in the pages of A Foreign Evil when Michael drunkenly follows a beautiful woman to a push-button hotel for a night of carnal pleasures that swiftly devolves into a nightmare of unearthly evil and sinister conspiracies. You’ve come all this way, though, so you know all about that. The journey here left its mark on you, I imagine. The Maddening is Carver Pike’s conclusion to the Diablo Snuff series, and this man knows how to end things with a bang. The best way I can think of to describe the events taking place in this novel is to suggest that it’s John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness meets The Purge while managing to be both more horrific and graphic than either of those movies. If that doesn’t sell you on diving into this book, I honestly don’t know why you’d be reading my reviews in the first place. You might not be my target audience, in which case you’re almost definitely not the target audience for Pike’s Diablo Snuff books. The movies were bad enough, allowing incarnations of evil creatures on the screen to infiltrate our world, stalking and murdering the viewers unfortunate enough to witness even small portions of each film. The release of the novels written by the authors who disappeared from The Grand Georgina signals the next stage of the Diablo Snuff master plan as the madness spreads throughout society, irrespective of nation or culture. This plague of lawlessness and insanity is amplified with the release of The Maddening, the book Tobias desperately hoped he could keep from distribution. None of these things are fast or dramatic enough in dismantling society and sewing chaos, and that’s where the app comes into play. Across the world, psychopaths and damaged people compete with one another to commit the most creative and devastating horrors, racking up more money with each rape and murder. Against this horrific backdrop, the members of Psalm 71 must make their way to the heart of the evil that is Diablo Snuff, saving as many innocent lives as they can along the way. Knowing this is the final volume in the Diablo Snuff series, it should come as no surprise that the tale culminates in a battle between the forces of good and evil that crosses the border separating our world from unearthly planes of existence. This is a spiritual clash that would make Frank Peretti envious. If you’re unfamiliar with Frank Peretti’s Christian horror novels, you might be missing out because some of them are surprisingly good; but they’re nowhere near as good as what Pike has laid out for us in the pages of The Maddening. This book is punctuated with set pieces of such depravity and cruel imagination that the reader can’t help but wonder at the apparent limitless creativity brought to the table by Carver Pike where horror is concerned. At its core, this is a story of hope, though. The Maddening–as with the Diablo Snuff series as a whole–is about facing a terrifying evil and refusing to flinch. It’s about standing ground and fighting, even when the easiest solution would be to turn away or to give in. Knowing that you may not survive, that those you love and who stand by your side may fall as well, but persisting in doing what you know must be done; that is the core of it all. In that respect, as in all others, Carver Pike has succeeded in crafting a masterpiece with this book.
While My Christmas Story by Rayne Havok is not a new story from her, it’s new to me, and it was a perfect tale for her to make available on Godless for the Antichristmas event this December. Lydia’s spending her first Christmas night alone, but her husband is still there…in spirit…in a sense. We’ll go with, “in a sense.” It was bad enough that Henry had gotten her a blender for Christmas this year, but that’s the least of his transgressions…and Lydia is not the forgiving sort. As she decorates her tree with the ornaments Henry provided, it does seem like Lydia is finally getting into the spirit of the holidays, and we can’t help but feel happy for her. While the holiday might have started as a bit of a disappointment, she found a way to make it festive just the same. If you’re familiar with Rayne Havok’s work, you damn well know what to expect…so I’m not going to spell it out for you here. If you’re not familiar with her writing, you’re in for an enchanting, heartwarming tale of Christmas cheer.
This title was released on http://www.godless.com as part of the Antichristmas event for December of 2021. You can pick it up for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the app to your mobile device of choice. The link is below:
Cockwinder introduces us to Liam, thus far the most stable and normal-seeming of the Smalls brothers. Don’t worry, the rest of them set the bar pretty damn low, so it’s easy to seem stable and normal by comparison. While in the midst of plowing his wife, Liam witnesses a strange reaction from Wendy, the little girl next door, through the window. He’d already felt like something was a bit off with Ray, the girl’s father, and the peculiar behavior Wendy displayed lines up with those sentiments. Liam’s concern is validated when he catches Wendy playing an unsettling game with her dolls, and he decides it’s time to do something about the monster living next door. This is the point in the story where Ash Ericmore hits us with all of that Smalls Family goodness we’ve come to expect. As garage tools and hardware are put to purposes that definitely violate warranties based on any manufacturer’s recommended use, Liam goes to work. The violence is as graphic and imaginative as any reader could hope to experience, and there’s a moment at the climax of the story that almost had me laughing out loud, just as Liam burst through the bedroom door in his newly crafted attire. I can’t spoil it, so you’ll have to read it for yourself. Thankfully, it all works out with a happy ending…but that should come as no surprise. The Smalls brothers always create their own happy endings from the disasters all around them.
You can pick this up for yourself by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app to your mobile device. The link is below:
Domus Necrophagous 