Slashers and Splatterpunks

by David Byron

  Off Season isn‘t just about the horror, though. Ketchum manages to infuse the characters with enough depth to make us identify with and care about them, with the first half of the story taking place on a much more normal level of the world, though the inherit violence of the last half is always just under the surface. Conventions are even shaken up a bit by Jack creating two small-town cops that are a lot more intelligent than we‘re used to, and actually figure out what‘s going on down by the ocean before they have to be told too explicitly that something‘s wrong there. Usually in a story like this the cops are the most ineffectual part of the entire picture, unable or unwilling to put the evidence in front of them together to form a logical picture; not so with Off Season. Yet another aspect that makes you care about the characters and makes the end of the story that much more difficult to shrug off.

  Apparently this ending was not in place in the book‘s original version and I really can‘t imagine what Ketchum went through having to change it. Indeed, in an afterward by the author (taken from Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition) he relates that of all the cuts he had to make, changing the ending was the most painful. I‘m glad to see it in place as it is now because it wraps up the book perfectly. It may not be a happy ending but, like the rest of the story, it is realistic, which is what makes it worse.

  Leisure has also been kind enough to include the story "The Winter Child" at the end of Off Season. It‘s not just a space-filler; "Child" is actually an offshoot story of Off Season, told from the point of view of a boy who‘s father, nearly destroyed after the lose of his wife and daughter, takes in a girl who shows up at their front door in the middle of a vicious winter storm. He never fully trusts here,

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  even as his father warms up to the child and treats her like his own despite the fact that she is nearly devoid of emotion, and eventually his worst fears come true in the worst way possible. It‘s a nice piece to include, showing that the events at the end of Off Season weren‘t truly the end, and setting up for the book‘s sequel, Offspring.

  Do yourself a favor; get Off Season. Show both Leisure and Ketchum that this the kind of book horror fans want; this is what makes us continue to love the genre. When violence is done just right, so it is shocking not just because of it‘s intensity but because you actually care about the people it‘s happening to, that is what horror fiction is all about and Off Season does it perfectly.

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  Wet Work

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  Philip Nutman is a name rarely known outside the zombie genre circles, but that could be just the fact that he hasn't written much in terms of novels since his explosive debut with his novel Wet Work. The novel was born out of the short story of the same title that was part of the 1989 zombie short story collection, Book of the Dead. Philip Nutman took the interesting twist on the zombie tale in that short story and blew it up to novel and epic proportions which brings to mind George A. Romero's grand opus work, Dawn of the Dead.

  The novel begins with one of the lead protagonists, Dominic Corvino (CIA covert operator and part of the black op and wetwork team code named Spiral), barely living through a botched mission in Panama City and realizing that there might be a traitor wihtin the team and the CIA. At the same time all of this was occurring the comet Saracen begins its close pass by of the the planet and leaving behind a gift which would begin the clock to humanity's downfall and damnation.

  It is back in the U.S. where the action really starts to go into overdrive as the effects of Saracen's pass-by of the planet begins to turn what should've been a normal day for D.C. cop Nick Packard into a decent into the hell that only grew worse with each passing day. Random, violent incidents begin to flood the station call-lines. It's the beginning of the zombie pandemic which starts off with a handful of attacks but which begins to spread in a geometric rate as each death returns to a semblance of life with only the extreme hunger for human flesh their only want or need. Most of the zombies were of the George A. Romero slow, shambling types but Nutman throws a wrench into the whole machine by allowing certain strong-willed individuals to return fully cognizant of their faculties and memories but at the same time harboring the same hunger as their slower and dumber cousins. These intelligent zombies will soon include Dominic Corvino as one of their numbers. As he battles his own hunger Corvino goes on a vendetta mission to take out those who betrayed him and his team in Panama City and whose new lease on unlife has turned the battle of the humans against the zombies into a slaughterhouse where the livings humans are both outnumbered and outgunned. It doesn't help that another side-effect of Saracen's pass-by of the planet was to lower the immune system of all humans worldwide. If the dumb

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  and intelligent zombies do not get the humans then infection and disease of all kinds would finish the job. Nick Packard gives the reader a point-of-view from the battleground itself. We see the world he knew fall apart around him as horrific scenes bombard him and his fellow officers at every turn. He also has to worry about his own wife who he has left behind at their D.C. suburban home before the crisis broke out. He, too, has his own mission to accomplish as law and order quickly crumble and fall around him and his brothers-in-arms. He now has the singular goal to reach his wife and hope that she has lived through the nightmare the world has turned into.

  As the story progresses to its inevitable conclusion, both Corvino and Packard's paths will cross and both men will have to settle their score with the powers-that-be who seem to have accepted the new order in the world and have adapted quite fast from protecting and serving the people to feeding on them.

  The book has its share of flaws that at times belie the fact that Nutman was new to this novel-size writing. The dialogue would become very cliched and purple in prose. I didn't mind the extreme level of gore (it's a zombie novel and I expected it, in fact) and violence, but the description of sex in the book seemed forced and too much like something out of Penthouse Forums to be believable. It just goes to show that it is much easier to write about violence and gore than it is to write a good sex scene. The story could've needed another hundred pages or so, as hard to believe as that might be. The story had a very consistent fast pacing which suddenly went warp-speed in the final 80-90 pages.

  In the end, even with the flaws in the story I thoroughly enjoyed reading Wet Work and was completely engrossed by its mixture of apocalyptic horror, Mack Bolan-type action sequences and splatterpunk excesses. It is a shame that Philip Nutman hasn't written more horror since he certainly seems to have a talent for it. I've read his comic book writing and they're very good to great which just makes it even more baffling he doesn't write more. I would recommend this book to all zombie fans who haven't read it yet. The book delivers as advertised and doesn't try to be anything but a rip-roaring, action-horror tale which will leave the reader exhausted but still wanting the story to continue even past the final

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  scene of judgement day by way of nuclear fire. Slashers & Splatterpunks

  Animals

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  Meet Syd Jarrett. His thirty-fifth year on Earth is fast approaching and his accepted state of existence in Monville, Pennsylvania is less than inspiring. Still nursing a broken heart over a shattered marriage, the only two constants in his life are making minimum wage as a blue collar grunt in temporary hard labor assignments, and spending his evenings at the local honky-tonk where he can revel in live R&B and the ambition-crushing power of booze.

  Shocked out of his melancholy-inspired routine one morning after slamming into a deer with his car, Syd follows the wounded creature's trail into the woods to put it out of its misery, only to encounter a monstrous wolf feasting on it. Believing he's next on the menu, Syd defiantly stands his ground, prepared to go down fighting. The moment man and beast make eye contact, something personal and primal passes between them. Then the wolf drags the
rest of its meal deeper into the forest and vanishes, leaving Syd perplexed and elated at his miraculous survival.

  While trying to fathom the instinctual connection he felt with the wolf, Syd unknowingly encounters it again when he meets Nora-an even deadlier predator in human form than in her werewolf one. With a thirst for Southern Comfort and an appetite for carnal passion, she's the embodiment of feminine sexuality, walking into Syd's heart and taking possession of it before he could blink. Exotic and ferocious, Nora is not a woman who should be attracted to Syd, but she's already sensed his potential from their previous encounter in the woods. Pulled into her intoxicating orbit, Syd loses himself in their physical lust, only to be dragged back to a reality where Nora's unpredictable mood swings erupt with violent fury. The danger of loving someone so damaged by life appeals and repels Syd at the same time, but he is falling for her and wants nothing more than to offer protection and safety from her demons.

  But there's only one demon that truly frightens Nora. His name is Vic. He's the Big Bad Werewolf who unleashed Nora's true nature, and he's been loving and tormenting her in a vicious cycle for more than seventy years-straying off to satisfy his sexual and sustenance hungers, then giving chase to reclaim her, mutilating anyone who crosses his path. On the run once again, Nora will stop at nothing to set the animal inside Syd free, regardless of what it will do to his sanity as long as she can use him against Vic.

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  John Skipp and Craig Spector don't reinvent the werewolf story so much as obliterate it. Forget the gypsy curses, full moons, werewolf bites, and silver bullets. The werewolves in Animals accept and embrace the bestial side of their natures, not reject it, but still find themselves conflicted by their all too human desires and emotions. As much as Nora and Vic prowl around, stalking and slaughtering prey with wild abandon, both yearn for a certain domesticity in their lives and wish to find a single mate for life, like real wolves.

  Syd also seeks his soul mate, but is unable to immerse himself in the quest. Embittered by his past, clinging to the vestiges of a life that no longer exists, he is a victim of his own inertia. He's a flawed but likable protagonist who earns our sympathy, as well as our derision from one situation to the next. Nora finds Syd at the crossroads and reminds him of what it means to be truly alive, only to inflict him with the unfortunate damage that seems inevitable with every relationship.

  Leaving out the supernatural aspects, Animals is an emotionally charged novel about love in all its beauty and ugliness, how men and women turn each other on and tear each other apart in equal measure, how trust and affection turns to suspicion and anger, how abuse becomes an acceptable substitute for loneliness, how your best friend can become your worst enemy, leaving fragile and fearful souls in its wake.

  Like their characters, Skipp and Spector embrace their animal sides, unflinching in their depictions of graphic violence that is a part of nature (human and otherwise). They also know that the pain of having your heart ripped out by a werewolf pales in comparison to the pain of a broken heart-for some, an open wound that may never heal.

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  Books Of Blood / Volume 1

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  This collection, the first in a trilogy, opens with "The Book of Blood," a haunted house story in the tradition of Richard Matheson's "Hell House." With the help of Simon McNeal, a twenty-year-old medium, the Essex University Parapsychology Unit records solid evidence of life after death at Number 65, Tollington Place. Dr. Mary Florescu is ecstatic to see such results after a lifetime's work in the field. But the "ghost writing" scrawled on the walls of an upstairs room turns out to be a hoax committed by McNeal, and the dead demand satisfaction. Using a method of torture inspired by Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," the restless spirits find a way to tell their stories.

  In "The Midnight Meat Train," Barker molds together sex and death, vomit and excrement into a messy organic sculpture, an intense and relentless tale of a murderer prowling the New York subway trains, providing meat for the "City fathers." This is a story of opened entrails, partially disemboweled corpses, meat cleft open, muscle pulled back, and glistening vertebrae. Barker's mouth seems to be watering as he writes, "[T]he exposed meat of the thigh was like prime steak, succulent and appetizing." In Barker's work, characters' bodily functions are described in loving detail: when an unlucky passenger sees the Butcher's handiwork, the sandwich he had eaten earlier goes "half-way up his gullet, catching in the back of his throat," and as the Butcher approaches the passenger's hiding place, the man is "suddenly aware of how full his bowels were." The entire framework of the story is sexual, with its phallic train rushing through the subway tunnels. Even moving from one subway car to the next is described in terms both gruesome and sexual: "[He] skinned his way through the slit he had opened and so through to the bloody chamber beyond."

  After the overwhelming gore of "The Midnight Meat Train," Barker shows a much lighter touch with "The Yattering and Jack," an amusing holiday tale about a lower demon tasked with driving a man insane. Also displaying some morbid humor, "Sex, Death and Starshine" is the (decomposing) tongue-in-cheek story of a doomed Shakespeare production and a mysterious man who is determined to see his dead wife on stage for the final curtain call.

  The two flawed stories in Barker's collection seem akin to "Night

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  Shift"-era Stephen King, but ultimately fail because of ridiculous subject matter or heavy-handed symbolism. The opening scenes of "Pig Blood Blues," with a new teacher joining the Tetherdowne Remand Center for Adolescent Offenders, feel like King's "Sometimes They Come Back" - but Barker's story collapses with the appearance of a possessed pig that has developed a taste for human flesh.

  "In the Hills, the Cities" is reminiscent of King's "Children of the Corn," with its protagonists arguing in the car during a road trip and encountering empty towns. While King's story began with Burt and Vicky bickering as they drove through the cornfields of Nebraska, Barker's tale starts with Judd and Mick fighting in the car and then making up in the wheatfields of Yugoslavia. They discover the twin cities of Popolac and Podujevo engaged in a "ritual battle," the inhabitants of each city gathered together and "moving as one creature, one perfect giant." Judd is ranting about communism at the beginning of the story, and the human giants later personify this "Trotskyist tripe." Tens of thousands of men, women and children are "harnessed to each other in a living system that allowed for no single voice to be louder than any other, nor any back to labour less than its neighbor's." In addition to laying on the symbolism a bit too thick, Barker succumbs to his propensity to overwrite, with passages like, "Night was approaching, mercifully bandaging up the wounds of the day, blinding eyes that had seen too much."

  Barker's writing fares best when he gleefully splatters the gore or adds the light touch of humor to horror. For readers who have not yet sampled the twisted visions of Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One is an excellent place to start.

  ***

  Volume One

  The Book of Blood

  This is the frame story for the entire Books of Blood series. A psychic researcher, Mary Florescu, has employed a quack medium named

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  Simon McNeal to investigate a haunted house. Alone in an upstairs room, McNeal at first fakes visions, but then the ghosts really do come for him. They attack him and carve words in his flesh, and these words, claims the narrator, form the rest of the stories, stories written on a literal, living Book of Blood.

  The Midnight Meat Train A down-and-out man, Leon Kaufman, falls asleep on a New York subway train, only to wake up at a secret station beyond the end of the line. Kaufman encounters a man named Mahogany, who has killed and butchered several people and hung their bodies up on the train. Mahogany remarks that he will be forced to kill Kaufman to guard his secrets. Kaufman fights Mahogany and kills him in self-defense, but then the train doors open and strange malformed cre
atures board the train. The creatures eat the dead passengers, then force Kaufman to serve them as their new butcher, cutting out his tongue to ensure his silence. They tell Kaufman that Mahogany was getting old and could not do the job any longer, and that Kaufman now has a new career. It is also revealed that the creatures have also been the secret rulers of New York City for centuries. The police have always covered up for the creatures. Kaufman finds he now has lifetime employment.

  A movie of the same name was released on August 1, 2008. The movie, for the most part, seems to follow the storyline of Barker's original design, minus the fact that the creatures themselves are described as having existed "Before the birth of any human, or longer" and it is the train conductor who tells him that he is now their new butcher.

  The Yattering and Jack Jack Polo is a gherkin importer who's haunted by a minor demon called the Yattering. This demon is commanded to haunt Jack by Beelzebub, the "Lord of the Flies", in retaliation for an ancestor of Jack's who did not fulfill his part of a deal he made with Hell. Despite its determined efforts to drive Jack mad, the Yattering is frustrated by his good cheer and apparent obliviousness. Unknown to the Yattering, Jack is well aware of the demon and what it is trying to accomplish. He purposely ignores the demon to frustrate it and to keep from going insane. Bound by the powers of Hell to stay in Jack's house until it succeeds, the Yattering subjects him to