splatterpunk

Black Planet: Books 1-4 by Nikki Noir

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Nikki Noir’s Black Planet: Books 1-4 collects together in one volume a sequence of novellas and short stories introducing us to a handful of residents of a Northern Arizona town and the sinister events corrupting and controlling those people, brought about by a mysterious, otherworldly object and the black goo that seems to be spreading through the North Woods.
Alternating between perverse sexual depravity, brooding cosmic horror, occult fanaticism, murder, and family drama, Noir manages to avoid missing a beat as she weaves a tale that keeps the reader begging for more…and then the final page arrives, and you can only hope for more to come.
She paints a portrait with the delicacy of a scalpel while utilizing a pallet produced by a hammer blow to the head and the arterial flow of a severed penis as she draws you into this world she’s created. If that description doesn’t make you want to read this book, I really don’t know what else I can say. Spoiling this particular story would be virtually impossible without dragging you, kicking and screaming all the way through the narrative itself, it’s such a feverish and surreal experience.
Keep in mind, as you read…the owls are not what they seem, a statement somehow more true in this novel than in Twin Peaks.

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Extinction Peak by Lucas Mangum

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Lucas Mangum’s Extinction Peak borrows heavily from themes familiar to fans of Jurassic Park/World franchise, Dino Crisis, and Land Of The Lost while painting a dizzying portrait of an apocalypse no one could have seen coming (except for those who made it happen, but that’s a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll leave it at that).
We’re first introduced to Deandra and her brother, Johnny, as they plan to leave the basement they’ve been sheltering in as the world outside descends into a carnage-filled nightmare Michael Crichton wouldn’t have dared explore, even in writing. Children of a deceased drug lord, neither Deandra nor Johnny are well adjusted or particularly sympathetic characters, particularly Johnny. I found myself wanting both of them to be devoured by dinosaurs almost immediately but knowing there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell if that were how it played out.
As we follow those two (and other characters we encounter along the way, many of them equally flawed and broken), we see far more detail of just how terrible and dangerous the world has become as these beasts emerged, seemingly from Hell, through the sinkholes around the world. As with most monster-themed horror, we soon find that the worst monsters aren’t the obvious ones, that it’s other people we really need to worry about. Fueled by greed, contempt derived from old world biases, and sadistic impulses that shouldn’t surprise any of us (but somehow always do), the story continues its fast-paced and character-driven journey through an increasingly unreal end to the world as we know it.
In all honesty, I would love to see Mangum explore this particular apocalypse in greater depth and detail, through the struggles of other people in other places, but this book is so detailed as to make it simple to close our eyes and imagine precisely what it might be like for others, even ourselves when the holes in the Earth begin opening up.
This book is filled with graphic violence, gruesome deaths, and subject matter that absolutely nudges it into splatterpunk territory…be warned that this is not a book for your dinosaur-loving children…unless you parent the way I would…and did.

Extinction Peak

Gone To See the River Man by Kristopher Triana

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Weaving together elements of American blues folklore, urban fantasy, and extreme horror, Kristopher Triana creates something entirely captivating and unsettling with Gone To See the River Man.

Lori is a middle-aged woman who cares for her brain-damaged and childlike older sister. She’s also a middle-aged woman who’s developed the same unhealthy obsession with an incarcerated serial killer we see in real life whenever and wherever one looks. The difference here is that she is sent on what seems like a simple quest by the killer, to retrieve a key and deliver it to The River Man. Nothing is quite so simple, though.

As the story continues, it becomes clear that Lori has an exceedingly disturbing past. The narrative we find ourselves caught up in becomes progressively darker and more uncomfortable as things become increasingly surreal and nightmarish in the real world as well as within Lori’s mind.

As we approach the end, we find ourselves wondering how we could have expected it to end any other way, as we experience the heartbreak for ourselves that no one within the story is human enough to feel.

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All Men Are Trash by Gina Ranalli

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Gina Ranalli has managed to write something cathartic with AMAT (I’m going to avoid using the proper title since I already got banned from Facebook for seven days by sharing a photo of the cover). This book is something necessary in response to cultures of incels and MRAs, as well as the sheer volume of toxic, sexist reactionary trolls attacking any attempt at inclusion or acknowledgment of intersectionality. In another (more superficial) sense, it’s also a bit of fantasy violence geared toward women in the same way literally decades of fiction has provided men with a plethora of fantasy violence. It works on all fronts with equal efficacy.

Reading this book, I was reminded of two other works of fiction. There was a television series, Masters of Horror, quite a few years back, and one of the self-contained stories was entitled “The Screwfly Solution.” The other fictional work it reminded me of was David Moody’s series of books that started with the novel, Hater. Both of those works were built around the concept of sudden, unexpected violent impulses arising within the population and a stark division between “us” and “them” becoming the way of the new world. All Men Are Trash takes a similar concept and infuses it with strong feminist sensibilities and a whole lot of satisfying violence.

This is perhaps not a good book for anyone prone to say things like, “Not all men,” or maybe it’s precisely the sort of thing they should read…to gain a little bit of perspective.

All Men Are Trash