Consumption is one of the most horrifically intriguing novellas that I’ve read for quite some time and it may just make you think twice about that special dinner invitation. Each of the six guests received their invitations through the post, a twelve course tasting meal courtesy of the renowned chef Heinrich Schauer. Through the winding …Read More
Annabelle Torres rolls into Blackburn Asylum dazed and confused, wet and bloody, asking to be voluntarily committed. Desperately in need of help and her memory all but gone. She’s taken for a Rambo style hose pipe shower and on to her new room at the asylum or cell, then she’s injected with the blue medicine, …Read More
The Bullet Ballerina is a tongue in cheek tale of revenge that fritters between hard boiled noir, black humour and spleen puncturing ballet. The cast, three characters. The Good. Until her toe was injured, Ellie was a sixteen year old ballet student with the world in front of her, she begs Johnny Booze not to …Read More
The Venus Complex is a provocative journey into a psychopathic consciousness that is one of the most gripping and disturbing mind trips I’ve read. Told in a journal entry style first person narration, the first time we meet Michael Friday is the recounting of his wife’s death in a car accident. His wife was cheating …Read More
‘A fly buzzed around his open, largely toothless mouth; drool dangled from his bottom lip like a limp lasso.’ A typical customer at The Grinnin’ Gator. Gator Bait is a novella by Adam Howe set in the Louisiana swamp and The Grinnin’ Gator, a saw dust on the floor type bar with dirty booze, strippers …Read More
I Tell You it’s Love by Joe Lansdale is a tale of deviance and devotion hurtling together. Two people possessed with darkness in their souls and a love with no boundaries. A love born from depths very rarely reached, intense and passionate, where there’s no limit to their depravity, when pain no longer suffices and …Read More
Leave the Living is a horror novella from Joe Hart and Darkfuse publications. Mickey Bannon is suffering, his ex-wife who he still loves is about to remarry, feelings are up in the air waiting for it all to end when the phone call comes that tells him his Father has died. Now he’s got to …Read More
People are Strange is a short story collection by James Newman and it’s like Jeff Strand says in the foreword, this ain’t the James Newman who wrote Midnight Rain, this is the James Newman who sits in a dark corner, giggling psychotically as he pens deviant horror filled tales. The first story is a bit …Read More
Death Songs from the Naked Man is a short story collection from Donn Gash and James Newman. The first story is the title story and tells of a bunch of shoppers in a shop ‘n’ go about to get a pleasant surprise when a naked man walks in holding a gun. Shits about to get …Read More
I must admit to never having heard of Barbie Wilde before she kindly sent me a review copy of Voices of the Damned and after reading it, I’m overcome with the sense of discovering something new, something horrifically bloody, lascivious and wickedly shocking. Voices of the Damned contains eleven short horror stories, each story is …Read More
F*CK-ME? F*CK-YOU! Is a horror short from one of the masters of simple shock fiction and there’s an easy to understand moral to this story. Firstly don’t cheat on your marriage partner. If you are a lowlife type person who wouldn’t even think about the hurt you’d cause to the one who loves you, then …Read More
They don’t call Route 50 ‘the loneliest road in America’ for nothing, it’s not a road you want to break down on, no phone signal and you could end up with the worst kind of sunshine break. Jim, Rita and Dinah are traveling down Route 50 when a shape swoops down on them from out …Read More
Bait is the debut novel by Jamie Kent Messum and is a quite gripping look at heroin addiction, isolation, desperation and how far you’d swim for a fix, how far you’d really go when death comes calling. Six strangers wake up on the beach of an island in the Florida Keys, stolen away from their …Read More
Do Not Disturb is a cam girl sexy, steamy, ardently arousing, pant stirring Knicker dampening, barrel of psychotic madness with one of the most exhilarating and enslaving female characters around. Damn this is hot, sign me up I think I’m in love *fanning furiously*. Fuck the story I’ll just listen to the voice of the …Read More
Don’t Stand So Close by Eric Red is, I have to admit, a book that I was suckered in by the cover, have to say it did it’s job perfectly and top marks for whoever choose them, IT, I mean it. To the story well it’s a bit of a coming of age tale with …Read More
In Left to Darkness, Craig Saunders gives us his twisted vision of the pre, present and post-apocalyptic dream, or nightmare in this case. Where the world changes in the aftermath of a meteor strike and a whole bunch of characters from very different walks of life, fight to survive. Set around London, the gridlocked M25, …Read More
Razorjack was, and is, a graphic novel written and illustrated by comic’s legend John Higgins. He of Watchmen, Killing Joke, Judge Dredd (and many more) fame. The graphic novel was a fun and visceral horror tale that introduced the concept and world of Razorjack. Razorjack is the fearsome, demon leader of a terrifying alternate dimension, …Read More
Paul Kane shits books; eight novels, seven novellas, nine short story collections, and thirteen edited/co-edited books. Best known for his Hooded Man series, retelling Robin Hood in a post-apocalypse world, Monsters collects together 17 stories and a dark ditty that have mostly been written for genre magazines and other collections over the past 16 years. …Read More
Seeing Evil is the kind of book that’s chock full of intriguing elements, the main one and something I particularly enjoy reading about is kids confronted by evil. A parent to be exact, and one that leaks menace from every pore, then smiles and when needed switches instantly into perfect parent mode. First chapter sees …Read More
Meet the Meat is another extreme horror novella from Sam West and this one tells the story of Thomas, whose main occupation is kidnapping women. An ever so slightly deranged individual that has one girl tied to the bed and another being served up on the kitchen table. His Mother died and he’s after someone …Read More
At just 68 pages The Customer Is Always… packs a punch akin to a brutal right hand from George Foreman in his heyday. This is a story you will read in one sitting, it’s impossible not to, a seriously gripping read that ramps up the tension almost immediately and leaves you a little bit unsure …Read More
The Rapist is the story of one Truman Ferris Pinter’s final hours before the death penalty is executed for his crimes, the rape and murder of Greta Carlisle. Told in first person, we ride the wave of opinion and conceited thought of a thoroughly dislikeable man with not a shred of restitution or an ounce …Read More
Now Vampire stories fall in two tidy little boxes in my world, you have the ones to be avoided at all cost, the ones that focus on the lovey dovey smutley side of things in Twilightesque fashion. And the ones where vampires are violent animals, killers with no remorse that can jump in trampolining stylie …Read More
If you’ve not read the first novel The Pilo Family Circus and there’s a slim chance you might one day in the future, then don’t read this review as there may well be spoilers of story ruining proportion. In a calamitous finale the Clowns of the Pilo Family Circus suffered an ending to beat all …Read More
Black Cat Mojo, how best to describe this collection of 4 short stories, well I had more fun than a tornado in a trailer park, its just graceful as a pig on ice, lower then a mole’s belly button on digging day and hotter than two hamsters farting in a wool sock. If your mind …Read More
In the future, death doesn’t mean the end for everyone, if you have the readies, your memories and your very essence can remain for as long as you see fit or until your computerized sanity finally flips and initiates a master reset. Mapping of the brain makes copying the human mind a reality that is …Read More
‘There are no mirrors in my apartment. I have forgotten my own face. My wife is a distant memory, and I can’t remember what she smells like, the melody of my son’s laugh, the butterfly kisses of my daughter’s soft lips on my cheek. They are shadows that haunt my every movement, and I drown …Read More
The Pariahs by Erik Hofstatter is an intriguing novella set in the years following the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. The story starts with the kidnapping of two children, Demyan and Akilina by Kalashnikov wielding men in radiation suits. Descendants of the disaster both children live with the abnormalities caused by radiation poisoning. Seventeen years had …Read More
Spook Lights by Eden Royce is a collection of 12 Southern Gothic horror stories, now these aren’t cringe inducing, gore infested ball breaking horror. More a slow burning quiet horror that creeps up on you and instead of burying an axe in the back of your head, gently breaths on the back of your neck …Read More
The God of the Razor is a collection of short stories by Joe Lansdale published by Subterranean press, bringing together all but one of his tales about the demonic entity from another dimension, the God of the Razor. The first story is the chilling centrepiece and the one that started it all, Nightrunners is without …Read More
