Lindsay Crook tells us a tale that’s a little bit Hostel, a little bit Nightcrawler, and a whole lot of unpleasantness. Does that sound amazing to you? It really should! As important as it is to love what you do, Hank loves his job perhaps a little too much. As a guard in the high-security facility where the most depraved desires are fulfilled, Hank witnesses atrocities that would shatter the spirit of most people. He is not like most people. What happens when watching simply isn’t enough? We’ve all taken liberties at work. There’s no sense in pretending we’re innocent of that. Unfortunately for Hank, his employers are far less forgiving than most. One might expect such a thing from a shadowy, secret organization that caters to only the ultra-wealthy and decadent when legal pleasures are no longer sufficient. Come walk the halls with us and tune into the monitors as we watch horrors unfold.
Day 2 of 31 Days of Godless brings us this fantastic title from Lindsay Crook. You can pick it up for yourself by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app. The link is below:
Warning: There are minor spoilers included in this review!
We rejoin John Stabberger as he gleefully slaughters a pregnant neo-Nazi. How else would one slaughter a neo-Nazi than with glee? Upon extracting the baby from her foul womb with perhaps less than surgical precision, he has to figure out what he’s going to do with the infant. As single-minded as Stabberger might be, he recognizes that the newborn isn’t guilty of the mother’s evil. Unfortunately, there are Nazis everywhere, including the hospital where Stabberger attempts to unload the baby on a buxom nurse. In fact, the hospital is less a hospital than a laboratory environment where awful human experimentation is conducted. Will John Stabberger finally meet his match in the unanticipated battle ahead of him? Well, of course not! He’s John Fucking Stabberger! Questions are answered: As sharp as an SS uniform might appear, is it anywhere near as sharp as a scalpel? How many razor blades can one fit into the wrenched-open jaws of a Nazi scientist? New questions arise: What is John Stabberger’s secret past? What happens when the blade spawning Nazi Annihilator encounters a target who is out of reach, with 24-hour protection and surveillance in a maximum-security prison? This installment of the Godless League takes no prisoners. Do any of them? Taking aim at anti-vaxxers and Nazis alike, John Baltisberger delivers a tense, exciting thrill ride through hospital corridors and basement laboratories like a B-movie hero on steroids.
This is the first book available as part of the Godless Halloween event: 31 Days of Godless. You can pick up a copy for yourself by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the app to your mobile device of choice. The link is below:
We first meet Fiona, a single mother doing what she can to provide for her daughter. As the story unfolds, we learn just how far she’ll go to do precisely that, and to make the world just a little bit safer for her child. Wesley is a depraved piece of work. Killstreme introduces us to a man who can’t get off without viewing snuff pornography–or what he believes to be snuff, since there’s some positively hyperreal productions out there. His wife has been neglected as he’s lost all interest in her, instead focusing all of his attention on the dark web where he spends far too much time and money. When he receives a questionnaire from a contact online, he’s thrilled to discover he might be able to take his obsession to the next level. Wesley has an opportunity to star in his own snuff film. Will he have his dreams fulfilled or will Wesley discover that some offers are far too good to be true? Rayne Havok handily subverts the misogyny that goes hand-in-hand with the sort of people who want to see women hurt and murdered. In the end, even as a man, I can’t pretend there was a single aspect of this story that wasn’t deeply satisfying. The graphic sexual violence is something one should expect when reading anything by Rayne Havok, but this is particularly extreme and so well described as to almost feel real. I’m sure this story won’t be for everyone, but it most certainly is for me.
You can obtain this terrific little tale by going to http://www.godless.com or by using the Godless app on your favorite mobile device. Unfortunately, Amazon has determined this title should be banned twice now. The link is below:
Donna Latham’s You Should Have Let Me In is a short flash fiction piece, so I’ll keep my review short as well. It starts with a knocking at the door and a sinister presence demanding entry, but it’s not the front door the stranger is seeking to access. Taking a page from I Know What You Did Last Summer, Latham provides her cruel, gruesome take on when an accident becomes something worse.
This short fiction title was only available by signing up for the D&T Publishing newsletter. You can do so by going to the following site, Since then, the title was released as part of the 31 Days of Godless event at http://www.godless.com for October of 2021. The link for that will be below as well:
Vera Harlow is a sweet lady, compassionate and kind. While she has certain quirks and residual coping mechanisms associated with a childhood stifled by unhealthy surroundings brought about by mental illness, she has managed to not only thrive, but to transform her trauma responses into strengths. The time we spend getting to know Vera, delving into her tragic backstory and the wholesome life she and her husband have built for themselves, ultimately makes everything else in this book all the more awful. Going door-to-door, selling a new carpet cleaner with effectiveness only someone who prizes cleanliness could manage, Vera has built up a tidy sum. With a new child on the way, she has a limited interval before she has to stop venturing out like she has been. It’s her final day of sales when she decides to venture down the dead-end road to the ramshackle house where the titular Slob resides. Why do we call him The Slob? It’s an excellent question, one Beauregard spends almost three full pages answering, as he describes the man in vivid and repulsive detail. As with Vera, as the keys turn in the locks that secure the front door of The Slob’s home, we’re trapped and plagued with an increasingly uneasy feeling that will prove to be all too prescient. The filth and madness of Vera’s early life prepared her for a great deal, but nothing could prepare anyone for being trapped with The Slob. Beauregard’s vividly detailed and gripping narrative is a masterpiece of transformative pain and horror that will make you want to scrub your walls and floors until everything is spotless, but after reading The Slob, you will probably never feel clean again.
Geick’s Cynophobia begins with a drabble. In this case, it’s a heartbreaking drabble that certainly sets the stage and tests the waters for the reader, in advance of the main story. It’s suitable for that purpose, in that it’s perhaps harder to read than what Geick offers up to us in this new tale of mental illness, irrational fear, and failing relationships. None of this is easy to read for an animal lover, and especially a dog lover. I am an animal lover. While I was growing up, I had several birds (my great aunt raised them for sale and had a room that consisted of virtually nothing but walls of bird cages. I’ve owned snakes and tarantulas. I have a daughter who didn’t take particularly good care of three guinea pigs she’d received as pets quite a few years ago–but she was only eight or nine at the time, so I shouldn’t have expected too much. They were adorable little things, though. They were, all three, sweet as can be, but they also produced a whole lot of waste that wasn’t properly cleaned up. I’ve owned a total of five ferrets over the years, and it’s challenging to keep up with the rancid mess they make, no matter how well-trained you believe them to be. We have a cat in our home, and we had a terrific rabbit until recently, and I’m allergic to both. I’ve had, at this point in my life, a total of 11 dogs, I currently own three of them, all under the age of five and two of them under the age of two. In October of 2019, the best dog I’ve ever owned died in my arms when a cruel sort of blood cancer stole her from me when she was only seven. It was worth mentioning all of that because I can sympathize with the protagonist of Cynophobia in a handful of ways while simultaneously considering him almost alien in others. No more pets was not the insoluble rule he expected it to be, he learns, as his wife progressively turns their home into a menagerie. The relentless hoarding drives the couple further apart and our protagonist distances himself from both his wife and his daughters. As the situation at home spirals out of control, Geick propels us toward a breaking point at which nothing will be the same. It’s a train wreck in relatively slow motion that the reader can’t turn away from. Cynophobia presents us with two possible endings, the original (S.A.D.) ending and the new ending Geick’s written for this version of the story. In one available ending, the sickness and mental illness appear to spread from one parent to the other, manifesting in an awful climax that will make many readers cringe. In the alternate conclusion, we witness the–hopefully–more natural end of the relationship and the outcome of the clear mental illness left unrestrained at the core of this tale. You’ll have to read them both, to discover which one you prefer. The splattery side of my nature prefers one, while the animal lover in me prefers the other. Neither of them is pleasant, and as the story says, there are no happy endings.
Cynophobia is available as an exclusive title from http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app on your preferred mobile device. The link to this title is below:
The Ghoul Archipelago takes us on quite the adventure. On the high seas, to the islands of Southeast Asia, we experience a region of the world unfamiliar to many of us. Kozeniewski populates his near-future vision of the exotic environment with smugglers, pirates, island tribes, missionary religious fanatics, a smug computer programmer and inventor, and, of course, zombies. We’ve witnessed zombies all over American and Europe, the cities of Asia, and the islands of the Caribbean. Stephen Kozeniewski takes us to a novel location where we can witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of the undead, somewhere it’s less apparent that the rest of the world is gone. At the core of this story, we see the same sad commentary on human nature fans of the subgenre should be familiar with. No matter where we are in the world, it would appear that we’re always too preoccupied with petty squabbles and power plays to focus on the survival that should be the unifying goal under such dire circumstances. As depressing as it might be, the author probably isn’t far off from the truth of it all. Skirting through a gauntlet of pirates on the payroll of a billionaire still fixated on profit, adherents of a Christian death cult, and a megalomaniacal naval commander are Henk Martigan and his crew of smugglers. Will anyone make it through Kozeniewski’s tale alive, or will monsters, both living and undead, grind all of the survivors into a meaty pulp of blood and viscera until only maggots thrive? It’s not easy to create an original story of the zombie apocalypse, but The Ghoul Archipelago is precisely that. Reliant on three-dimensional, believable, and even sympathetic characters, Kozeniewski propels the reader through scattered viewpoints as the adventure becomes far more than just a zombie story. Jennifer Fournier’s audiobook narration is excellent, especially when capturing shifts in cadence and accent from one character to another.
Hell Week introduces us to Tailor, President of the Sigma House fraternity, just as he’s about to cross a line from which he’ll never come back. Let’s face it, though, Tailor was an irredeemable and monumental piece of shit long before he ever approached the line he’s careening toward. You’re sure to feel just like I do, thinking Hoop can’t show up fast enough. Tailor and his inner circle of fraternity brothers pride themselves on degrading women in every conceivable way, but they appear to especially enjoy drugging and raping impressionable and insecure younger girls from their college. Alone with Nicole/Melanie/Pig Dolphin as she’s rapidly losing consciousness, Tailor discovers that taking everything up a notch might be the only way he’ll be able to get off this time. Already a monster, he doesn’t flinch as he passes the point of no return, in the process, destroying multiple additional lives with casual cruelty and disregard for anything approaching humanity. This kid should have been on Hoop’s radar for a long time before the events of Hell Week. Spoiled, narcissistic, cold-blooded, and lazy, the best that can be said about Tailor is that he’s apparently handsome and that he comes from wealth. Thankfully, with Hoop’s intervention, Tailor manages to do something good, unintentionally taking out the trash as he receives his comeuppance. Lewis Kelly is a new name for me, as I’m sure he is for many of you, but his is a name you’ll want to be watching for. I do not doubt that we’ll be seeing a lot of good material coming from this up-and-coming writer. Hell Week is a worthy addition to the Hoopiverse, and Lewis is a worthy author to have been included.
This title is available September 15th, 2021 on http://www.godless.com or through the Godless app, available on your preferred mobile platform. The link is below:
Ryder Kinlay is back again with the continuing adventures of David Longbottom. Time has passed since the events of Bloodymoon, and David has his 31st birthday on the near horizon. What does one give the man who has virtually everything and who is not shy about taking whatever else he wants? Drugs, drinking, and debauchery have kept him going, but he’s getting bored and the pandemic conditions have hampered his fun. Concerned about his apparent malaise, his mother and a couple of his friends have a surprise in store for David. If you thought the bloody honeymoon was violent and cruel, you’re in store for a real treat with this birthday bash. I’m perhaps a bit biased, as Ryder Kinlay offered to kill friends and fans if they could suggest a suitable way to torture and kill Longbottom’s victims. I was lucky enough to be one of those victims. It’s almost as if the author read my mind with the fate that befalls Nikolas in this story. I used to joke with my children that I was going to include it in my will that anyone who wanted an inheritance from me would have to consume me at the funeral reception. I suggested the exterior could be taxidermied while the meat could be prepared in a variety of ways for those who wanted to join in on the celebration. I worry that Donna, the other victim at the climax of this tale, may have never considered her ultimate outcome as the sort of thing she’d hope to experience. I just got lucky this time. Also, apparently I’m at least sort of hot in the fictional environment of the story, and I’ll take it! If you enjoyed American Psycho, you’ll love the references peppered through this story, and you’ll just love the story anyhow. Check it out!
You can obtain this story for yourself at http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app on your mobile device. For a limited time, you’ll also obtain a free copy of the first Longbottom Misadventure, Bloodymoon. The link is below:
Sawbones introduces the reader to Edward Smalls, one of seven siblings in the Smalls family, and it is one hell of an introduction. A meeting with Alfred Leonard, a drug dealer and the criminal equivalent of middle-management, takes an unexpected turn as Edward is asked if he’d be willing to supply a snuff film for some new European business partners. No stranger to killing, Edward agrees to the strange proposition.. He already makes a living by supplying harvested organs on the black market, earning him the nickname Sawbones. How hard can it be to make a video incorporating sex and death? Locating a suitable victim and getting her back to his dungeon workspace turns out to be the simple part. Everything else seems to be working against him, from the oppressive heat to unwanted visitors. Edward learns the hard way that film sets are a perpetual state of barely organized chaos, and that the people behind-the-scenes bankrolling the production often seem not to share the same creative vision as the director. Edward Smalls is a strangely likeable character, considering how he earns his living. Ericmore successfully fleshes out a human monster who seems uncomfortably relatable and awkwardly amusing. It’ll be interesting to meet the other members of the Smalls family as the series continues. If this first installment is a solid basis of what to expect, there’s no way anyone could come out of this series feeling disappointed. The story reads like the novelization of a film written as a collaboration between Tarantino, Ritchie, and Roth.
You can obtain Sawbones, as well as the subsequent two volumes of the series right now, by going to http://www.godless.com or by downloading the Godless app. The link is below:
Domus Necrophagous 