RIP Philip Nutman, 1963 - 2013

Horror writer and journalist Philip Nutman died yesterday. Read a wonderful memoir of him by Fangoria editor Tony Timpone here. I really enjoyed the short stories he wrote in the early '90s, published in the anthologies Book of the Dead, Splatterpunks,and Borderlands 2. He also wrote the screenplay of Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, and was one of Clive Barker's earliest champions. I've had his only novel Wet Work (1993) for years but it remains unread. Rest well, brother...

Shock Rock, edited by Jeff Gelb (1992): The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle

Brimming with monstrous mash-ups of horror and rock'n'roll, Shock Rock (Pocket Books, Jan 1992) takes the old-timey preacher scare that rock is the Devil's music not as a warning but as fait accompli. In his introduction, Jeff Gelb (editor of the long-running Hot Blood erotic horror series) points out the long relationship between rock'n'roll and horror movies and comics - so why not horror fiction (Alice Cooper says the same thing in his forward)? "At last count, less than half a dozen horror novels have attempted to meld rock and horror thematically," Gelb notes. Well, I think there is a reason for the rarity: that intertwining works wonderfully well for album covers and song lyrics, but it generally produces less than stellar horror fiction. Such is the case, sad to say, with Shock Rock.

I passed on Shock Rock when it was published, and my instincts were right. Most of the 20 tales Gelb assembled are, to not put too fine a point on it, adolescent and amateurish (I know, I know, you could describe a lot of rock'n'roll the same way and so think I'm being a hypocritical snob when I criticize the stories thusly). While there is a splatterpunk energy, too many are dorky and earnest, an outsider's imagining of what it's like to be a rock star, a drug addict, or a teenage rebel. And no Poppy Z. Brite?! She's one of the few horror writers of that era to have written with any sensitivity or authenticity about how music informs characters' lives and thoughts.

Thomas Tessier's "Addicted to Love" stands out as the best story of the lot, as its pure clear notes soar high above the cluttered, tuneless din of the rest of Shock Rock. Workaday Neil Jensen is a thoughtful music fan who likes - lives for - challenging, edgy, exciting rock music. He meets a woman at a show by The Bombsite Boys (a fictional band, well-named), a woman who tells him she likes Public Image and The The, The Cure and The Adverts.

Neil felt a tremor of excitement. If she could appreciate groups like those, she had to have some musical intelligence. He bought her a drink, reminding himself not to get his hopes up to high. He had been disappointed before, every time.

Then he gets her home, and she wants to hear a particular song, a song that is not challenging, edgy, or exciting. She wants to hear it over and over again.... Tessier can write, and has written convincingly about the music scene before, in his first novel The Nightwalker. Placing Tessier's prose within the same pages as Rex Miller's or Paul Dale Anderson's or Michael Garrett's is unfair; it only highlights how clumsy are their attempts to meld rock and horror.

1994 Pocket Books sequel

Other stories worth reading: "Vargr Rule" by Nancy Collins, a nicely sleazy werewolf tale, which contains one of the antho's most surprising scenes; Richard Christian Matheson's taut and fatalistic "Groupies," about you-know-what; and definitely "Requiem" from Brian Hodge. He creates a pretty believable art/prog-rock band of the 1970s and '80s, Grendel, who all die in a plane crash, leaving behind countless grieving fans and a rumored concept album about the Knights of the Round Table. "You Know They've Got a Helluva Band" from Stephen King mines baby-boomer dead rocker territory in a fairly by-the-numbers manner. Jimi Hendrix features in "Voodoo Child" - well, duh - Graham Masterton's contribution. It has a nicely personal vibe, a sadness about the passing of time and wild youth. "Flaming Telepaths" ends the antho, former punk singer John Shirley's swipe at smug televangelists - one of 1980s horror fiction's go-to villains.

Cooper and Shirley, 2001

The fault of Shock Rock is that too many of the authors simply have no feel for the written word, or for capturing human speech patterns and motivations; they may as well be re-telling a moldy-oldy EC Comics story, only adding more sex and graphic violence but no depth. Slapdash and junky, most don't even show a particular feel for rock'n'roll other than its most obvious trappings of sexist excess, substance abuse, and amps that go to 11. To me, that's the most shocking thing of all.

Hellbound Hearts: Horror Anthologies of the 1980s

Ah, '80s horror anthologies! These were really my favorites back in the day when I was working in a used bookstore and reading horror fiction with an all-consuming appetite. I ordered these titles like crazy, waiting impatiently for the UPS guy to arrive with boxes of new books ordered from Ingram and Baker & Taylor, ready with the boxcutter to slice 'em open and get at the goodies inside. First up? Why, it's Hot Blood (1990) from Pocket Books! Stories of horror and sex and their twining, by Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Graham Masterton, Ray Garton, David J. Schow, Skipp & Spector - oh my cup it do runneth over! I didn't know who Jeff Gelb was, but my days as a teenage Jersey metalhead had made me familiar with Lonn Friend, who edited the essential metal mag RIP.

Of course the Hot Blood series turned into quite a long-running one as the 1990s wore on; there were myriad ways to make sex and horror mix and mingle...

The Night Visions series, originally published in hardcover by specialty horror press Dark Harvest, were reprinted in paperback by Berkley. Lots of great names here, although I really only read a very few.

This series also continued into the '90s. Night Visions 3 from '86 was the first appearance of a little novella by Clive Barker called The Hellbound Heart; I think it was the basis for some movie or other.

Now we reach the Borderlands, and here there be dragons. I will always remember this great series for introducing me to Poppy Z. Brite, Karl Edward Wagner, and Joe R. Lansdale, so as you might imagine, it holds a special place in my own hellbound heart! (Oh look, it was originally published in October 1990 - no matter, it was the '80s up till at least Nevermind, if not Pulp Fiction, hope you don't mind me mixing my pop cultural metaphors.) The Borderlands went on for another four or five books, and were even reprinted by specialty gaming publishers White Wolf, and editor Thomas Monteleone started his own Borderlands Press. I simply must replace my long-gone copies for a reread.

As a young burgeoning liberal dude with female friends who all wanted to be writers (Anais Nin, to a one!) I consciously branched out with Women of Darkness (1988), and recall the bizarre delights of tales by Nancy Holder, Kit Reed, and Elizabeth Massie. Indeed there was a sequel to this as well, but I don't think I ever read it.

Whispers began as Stuart David Schiff's labor of love magazine, then in the late '70s became paperback anthologies, which were reprinted in the '80s by Jove Books, as you see here. Love the tormented silvery faces (predicting the covers of the Dell/Abyss series to come; the artist is Marshall Arisman). The stories herein seem to be much more quiet horror, and names like Charles L. Grant, Robert Aickman, Fritz Leiber, William F. Nolan, Alan Ryan, Manly Wade Wellman, Dennis Etchison, Campbell, Wagner, and the like predominate. Pretty sure I read some of this stuff well before I read even any King, but damn that was a long time ago.

Of course Texas born-and-bred Joe Lansdale his ownself edited an anthology of western-themed horror stories! Nicely titled too: Razored Saddles (1989). This one was labeled as "cowpunk" on its spine, a jokey nod to splatterpunk. Now honestly I've never really cared about westerns at all - something about all that brown dust, brown sand, brown storefronts, and brown horses bores me to impatience (the brown liquor's okay though) - so I've never read this one at all. Surely one of you folks out there has.

Other '80s horror anthologies that I've already reviewed: Cutting Edge (1986), Prime Evil (1988), and Silver Scream (1988). Which ones did I miss?

The Paperback Covers of Shaun Hutson: Ain't Nothin' but a Gorehound

Well, nobody asked for 'em but here they are: the covers of Shaun Hutson's pulp horror paperbacks from the 1980s, all published by Leisure Books. Hutson's reputation is that of a goremonger for gore's sake and often gets lumped in with the splatterpunks. Me, I'd put him in with Guy N. Smith, pale imitators of James Herbert, and not to be confused with Barker or Schow or Lansdale et al. Still, this being a horror fiction blog and all, I feature Hutson because he was pretty central to the paperback boom of the era.

1985 UK paperback

Some of you may have read my review of Slugs (1982), Hutson's most infamous work; while it had energy and gleeful carnage, it was rather a shitty Xerox of Herbert's The Rats. Yes, this stuff has its place in horror, when you want to put your brains on vacation, but honestly Hutson's never interested me at all; I generally want a lot more from my horror fiction than sleazy grody pulp. But I have to say these cover images are really cream of the crop of excessively graphic '80s horror paperbacks! Enjoy.

Admittedly, The Skull (1982/Leisure 1989) is pretty reductive for a horror paperback cover; not only is it a skull, but it's a skull with fangs.

Erebus (1984/Leisure 1988) is the personification of darkness in Greek mythology as well as a region of the Underworld, so yeah, great horror title! I love the intensity on the vampire's face - he's got a real Ray Liotta vibe.

The inevitable sequel to Slugs came in the form of Breeding Ground (1985/Leisure 1987). This has a Tor Horror look to it, but it's nothing too outrageous.

Holy shit, this cover for Spawn (1983/Leisure 1988) is amazing! Reminds me of mad-scientist science-fiction pulp from the '50s. Check out a good review at PorPor Books blog - thanks for the pic!

Aaaaaaahhhhh!!! With its obnoxious and intense cover art, Shadows (1985/Leisure 1990) is as far removed from the vintage Charles L. Grant identically-titled anthology series as you could probably get. It's also about psychic healers and whatnot, which is one of my least favorite sub-sub-subgenres of supernatural horror. Ah well.

And as for Charlie Grant's Shadows, well, check back real soon!

Meat the Authors! John Skipp and Craig Spector 1988

Ha ha ha - get it?! I had to share this awesomely ridiculous, or ridiculously awesome, illustration of splatterpunk maestros John Skipp and Craig Spector, which can be found in their rollicking 1988 rock'n'roll horror epic The Scream. Enjoy!

Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror, edited by Paul Sammon (1990): The Filth and the Fury

We're all aware of the origins of the term "splatterpunk" aren't we? Feels like I've covered it a million times before, and if you have any interest in horror fiction you probably have a fairly good idea of its practitioners and artistic aims already. But just like every offshoot of a mainstream genre, people disagree over its identification and meaning. Basically, "splatterpunk" describes a small faction of horror writers in the 1980s and early 1990s who, while bestselling horror (or "horror") novelists were giving cozy, polite thrills to unadventurous readers, wanted to shake up conventional generic expectations. And they pissed off quiet horror writers like Charlie Grant, Dennis Etchison, and even Robert Bloch himself with their "there are no limits" attitude.

For me, though, not solely gore for gore's sake were the splatterpunks; this wasn't just shock tactics without substance. No, these young writers wanted to fuse extreme violence and horror (the "splatter") with a confrontational social sensibility (the "punk") to provide a countercultural, more streetwise take on our collective fears at the end of the century. It was not just extreme violence and viscera and degradation - psychological insight into alienated characters was as essential as blood-on-the-walls-and-ceiling taboo-smashing.

Editor and film critic Paul Sammon, who'd previously produced documentaries on Platoon, Dune, and most famously Blade Runner, was so enamored of the movement he put together Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror. And even though virtually every author in this anthology states that they are not splatterpunks, it's obvious the stories themselves are, and that's really all that matters. They're willfully ugly and despairing and silly and angry and unflinching, sometimes all at once. This book was pretty much my jam back in the day; I remember eagerly buying my trade paperback copy of it at the 1991 Weekend of Horrors Fangoria Convention in New York City, and it's never left my collection.

Me in NYC 1991; in that bag is this book!

After a short intro from Sammon, the bar is set very high with the first story: Joe R. Lansdale's utterly harrowing "Night They Missed the Horror Show." I've read this several times over the years and it never fails to feel like a solid punch in the gut. Redneck racism, one of Lansdale's staples, is exposed in all its soulless and dehumanizing excess. He pushes our snouts right into the rawest filth. It'll leave you feeling hollowed out and horrified. Is it art? It's unforgiving and the bleakest of the bleak, so... yes? Yes. A modern classic it is.

Lansdale his ownself

One of the few non-American writers in the movement was the esteemed (and bestselling) Clive Barker. But of course. His Books of Blood changed the nature of horror fiction in the 1980s. "The Midnight Meat Train," with its ludicrously graphic title, is one of his most vividly realized and icily graphic tales: a city that feeds on innocent lives, a race that exists solely so that humanity can ignore it, a god that demands the ultimate fealty, a man whose urge to know leads to a horrible new life. Another classic:

It was a giant. Without head or limb. Without a feature that was analogous to human, without an organ that made sense, or senses. If it was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all moving in unison, budding, blossoming, and withering rhythmically...

"Film at Eleven," from actual unapologetic splatterpunk John Skipp, of Skipp & Spector fame, springboards from the on-air TV suicide of Pennsylvania politician R. Budd Dwyer and the spousal abuse of a diehard Oprah fan. The final effect of eternal recurrence seems almost cruel, but it implies that justice does not come easy. Not bad. I've written before of my appreciation for Douglas E. Winter's zombie parodies of contemporary literature, and here it's "Less Than Zombie." Capturing Bret Easton Ellis's style of anomie and privileged rich-kid sociopathy perfectly - And, oh yeah, the thing with the zombies - it ironically prefigures Ellis's American Psycho. It's also the first time I encountered the curb stomp, nearly a decade before American History X.

Recently deceased splatter film connoisseur Chas. Balun presents an essay, "I Spit in Your Face: Films That Bite," on the most extreme gore movies of the day: loverly films such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Nekromantik, Last House on Dead End Street, and Roadkill. He warns "hipsters" not to act too blasé when confronting these flicks; they'll knock those sniggering grins right back through their teeth, or something. Awesome.

Freak-show fiction became something of a thing after Katherine Dunn's masterful Geek Love (1989) was published, and that's where "Freaktent" comes in: Nancy A. Collins is a solid writer which gives the story a real grounding for its natural physical atrocities: Images of children twisted into tortured, abstract forms like human bonsai trees swam before my eyes. Mediocre TV horror-movie director Mick Garris sleazes it up with "A Life in the Cinema," about hack horror director who adopts a soul-and other things-sucking monstrous turd baby for his next exploitation flick; it's a real charmer. The lost chapter from Ray Garton's Crucifax is presented here, so grotesque his publisher excised it from its paperback edition, but I seriously prefer "Sinema," which appeared in Silver Scream. Read that one instead.

Hugo Award-winning Martin in the 1970s

Although today he's known as an outrageously popular fantasy author, George R.R. Martin wrote a matter-of-factly horrific science-fiction story in 1976 which is included here, "Meathouse Man." It's the oldest story collected, but it's also one of the very best, an emotionally complex story of a man, his work, and unrequited love. Oh, and zombie sex on distant planets called corpseworlds. Probably the best-written and most affecting piece in the anthology: He slept with a ghost beside him, a supernaturally beautiful ghost, the husk of a dead dream. He woke to her each morning.

Spector, Lansdale, Matheson, Schow, Garton, McCammon, & Skipp:

Yes, The Splat Pack c. 1986/7

TV writer Richard Christian Matheson (yes, the son) contributes two of his short-short fictions, "Red" and "Goosebumps." Short sharp shocks, nicely done. Reminds me that I'm still trying to find a decent copy of his collection Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks, which I lost ages ago. Another British writer, Philip Nutman, who interviewed many filmmakers for Fangoria mag, presents a grim picture of the bloody-minded futureless 1980 youth of his home country in "Full Throttle." Tough stuff; I can practically see the young Tim Roth and Ray Winstone carousing in a movie version.

Also included are solid stories of varying grit and grisliness by Edward Bryant ("While She Was Out," years later made into a film), Wayne Allen Sallee ("Rapid Transit," first in a trilogy of short urban terror tales), and Roberta Lannes ("Goodbye Dark Love," which I'd first read in Cutting Edge) also feature, each probing the depths of contemporary non-supernatural horror with an emphasis on character. The worst in the anthology is truly Rex Miller's "Reunion Moon," which I'll not even describe except to say it's a piece of shit.

Splat poster boy David J. Schow is not included here for various reasons, as Sammon explains, but it's just as well because I prefer his non-splat work. I thought J.S. Russell was a Schow pen name but it's not; Russell's "City of Angels" reads just like one of Schow's stories, so I think it was a fair guess: Porqy, he's got this thing about the nuts and how they're the "bestest part"... he's been talking about baby nuts for days. "I figure," he says, "they got to be more tender. Tastier, like lamb or baby corn," and pops them in his mouth like wet jelly beans.

Splatterpunks finishes with Sammon's 75-page (!) essay on the movement, "Outlaws." While it's unearned and ridiculous to compare these writers to hallowed transgressors like de Sade, Baudelaire, William Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard, as he does, trying to give weight to a fleeting literary moment that was named as an inside joke, he certainly helped me get to reading lots of those folks back then. It's okay to simply be a graphic yet thoughtful horror writer but I guess he didn't feel that way. He includes an extensive splat reading list and influences (and presciently notes that Ballard's Crash would be a perfect David Cronenberg, uh, vehicle).

Like a lot of anthology editorials of its day, "Outlaws" is overwrought and overly generous to the practitioners. Virtually none of the authors appreciate the label, and only a handful are still active today. Only Garton and Lansdale continue to publish well-received novels; Skipp is only recently back after a long hiatus; Barker has slowed down his publishing pace considerably. These authors transcended the style. A lot of splatterpunk might seem like a shallow, adolescent pose, a "look how gross and rebellious I can be" kinda thing, but plenty of it has heart - and guts - to spare.

Seeing Red by David J. Schow (1990): Fright Film Blurred

The first of two collections of David J. Schow's horror stories published in 1990, Seeing Red was one of my favorites back then. While Lost Angels included his longer, more ambitious, less genre-specific works, Seeing Red is just a bit more traditional. Many of the 14 tales here were originally published in magazines such as the '80s return of Weird Tales, or in Night Cry, Twilight Zone, or Whispers. What made them so appealing to me was their breadth of style: some are almost EC comic-like, others are glimpses into writers' lives, still others are energetically violent, and a couple even show some real sentimentality.

Unused 1990 cover art by Tom Canty

After the friendly, if slightly critical, intro by T.E.D. Klein - he relates how impressed by Schow's work he was as editor of Twilight Zone magazine in the early '80s and wonders if Schow is "too smart for horror" - the opener "Red Light" is one of Schow's best but was also in Lost Angels. "Bunny Didn't Tell Us" is a gleefully gross revenger about hapless graverobbers. "Incident on a Rainy Night in Beverly Hills" might be too much of a Hollywood in-joke; L.A. is Schow's bread and butter and the movie industry figures largely in many tales here, but I found "Incident" distractingly talky. "Coming Soon to a Theater Near You" is one of two stories set in movie theaters, and is straight-up repulsive, flesh-crawling horror.

Original Twilight Zone mag art

The willfully obnoxiously-titled "Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls" is a true entertainment of a creepy gore-movie reviewer whose critical savaging of the titular film puts him in a delicate and unexpected place. This is the kind of insider-style horror story I truly dig. Another fave is "One for the Horrors," which has warmly occupied my heart of horror these many years. How could I not love a story about a movie theater that shows the movies that never were, shows the scenes the censors demanded cut, and is a love story about movie-lovers to boot? Cinephiles rejoice, it's wonderful.

Original Twilight Zone mag art

Same for "Pulpmeister," an autobiographical account of a hack men's adventure scribe who inexplicably meets the macho hero of his stories. Like Karl Edward Wagner, Schow uses his own experiences as a pulp writer and its attendant miseries for his fiction, dining on Kraft mac-and-cheese and dealing with harried, careless agents and editors, not to mention the horror of cranking out 200-page action novels in under a week. I can't even imagine!

A graffiti sigil stands in for the title of another, a tag from the beyond; a seriously authentic tale of street-punk lowlifes hustling on Hollywood Boulevard: Where was Sid Vicious's star? Jello's? Wendy O's? Nothing on the Walk of Stars related to Eye Man's reality. Fuck it. Schow's detailing of a horrific car crash that kills one of the punks hits dead-on. It also provides the collection with its title. "The Embracing" did nothing for me and was a drag to finish; it seemed like a pale imitation of one of Harlan Ellison's dystopic moral screeds of dark fantasy; it's also the earliest story here so maybe that explains its derivative quality.

2002 reprint from Babbage Press

The star of Seeing Red is easily "Not from Around Here," the last in the collection, and one not published previously. Herein Schow's prose is more thoughtful and measured but not to fear: when the gore comes it's graphic and upsetting. Set in the rural areas outside San Francisco, it's sort of a story about a city slicker in the big bad woods who gets more than he bargained for. There are shades of Klein and King and Wagner, yes, but the sexual nature of the violence is presented in an unexpectedly new manner. "Not from Around Here" is actually scary, monster scary, which isn't something you find in horror fiction as much as you'd think. But it's about something too: there is bravery, loss, realization, and a new life to be had when fear is conquered.

While Schow's hyper-literate, arch, sometimes obnoxiously insider-y prose and endless now-dated cultural references might seem off to readers today, there are still some real gems in Seeing Red, some that I didn't even get around to discussing ("Lonesome Coyote Blues," "The Woman's Version," "Night Bloomer"). I find that dated quality kind of charming in a way. He liked to play with the genre and wasn't out solely for shocks; this probably lost him as many readers as it gained him. Schow may have moved on to a life of crime-writing these days, but I'll always remember him for Seeing Red.

Cellars by John Shirley (1982): Well, New York City Really Has It All

Cellars (Avon May 1982) is the first book I've read by John Shirley, a multi-talented author and musician who has published novels and short stories not just in the horror fiction field but also in crime/suspense and science fiction. SF icons like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have named his early works as influential on the legendary cyberpunk movement, although Shirley certainly never became as famous or as widely-read as those two. Shirley had actually been a singer in a punk-rock band and since his background was in that kind of counterculture, it's no surprise that his second horror novel, an Avon Books original, is also seen as a precursor to - you guessed it - splatterpunk.

I'd heard of Shirley for years, but his books have only recently become widely available in mass-market paperbacks; his 1992 novel Wetbones and his 1997 collection of short horror stories Black Butterflies have been republished by Leisure Books. Both apparently fall into the "graphic horror" category; Cellars has its share of gore and many think it paved the way for Clive Barker and the like, as well as today's extreme horror writers. With a grim view of human nature, a concern for urban fringe characters who've fallen through society's cracks, and the whole "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" attitude - an attitude which Shirley displays much more effectively and believably than the splatterpunks - I can definitely see how Shirley must have inspired Skipp and Spector and David Schow. I can't imagine something like The Light at the End or The Kill Riff without it.

Cellars begins with the investigation of a series of what appear to be ritual murders, bodies flayed open in abandoned New York City subway stops or dirt-strewn basements of old apartment buildings. Bizarre scribblings accompany the bodies and the investigating cop, weary Cyril Gribner, calls in Carl Lanyard. A skeptical journalist for a trashy occult tabloid who had once been an assistant professor of anthropology, Lanyard is in New York to interview Madelaine Springer, a hopeful, beautiful actress with unwanted psychic powers. When Lanyard identifies the phrases as probably ancient Persian, and referring to the malevolent deity Ahriman, the action proper can begin. Well, all right! Darian Trismegestes, Lanyard's boss at the tabloid, offers him an oddly huge amount of cash to hang around and write about the investigation.

Lanyard is an interesting character, a divorced, somewhat troubled man, a definite skeptic but still seeing strange dark shapes swirling around and who heard voices as a bullied kid. Is his skepticism preventing him from seeing what's truly going on? Gribner sees quite a bit of what's really going on when he realizes his nine-year-old nephew who's living with him may also be involved (finding his nephew in the bathtub listening to a strange growling coming from the drain is a chilling moment). Then there is Joey Minder, a pompous theater and film producer with Madelaine under his thumb, who is deeply involved with the occult world and sees human sacrifice as a way to gain unlimited power. Don't they all.

2006 edition

 Shirley's style only hits a few sour notes; his writing is smooth and assured, and the dialogue rings true. He has a detailer's eye for the the gritty, nonsupernatural dangers of New York City streets of 1981 and the attendant drug trade, criminal youth, abandoned buildings and miles of subways drenched in graffiti, and filthy homeless people - less like a horror novel and more like big-city crime fiction, although at times his penchant for adding a mildly askew, hallucinatory effect to these descriptions reminded me of Ramsey Campbell. He's walked these mean streets and the authenticity is palpable. But at 300 pages Cellars feels a bit overlong; some pruning could have worked well in the middle of the book to make it more of the intense, shuddering experience Shirley seems to want it to be, quick and dirty and raw and unblinking. (Cellars was partially rewritten and republished in 2006).

Shirley is a punk, punk, a punk rocker

The graphic quality of the ritual murders and the environs seems less intended to shock or upset than to simply pull back the curtain and deal honestly with human depravity. In that sense Cellars also has more in common with crime fiction than with horror. But then Shirley's cult members aren't just psycho; in the end they're right. The Blessed People - many of whom are monstrous and bloodthirsty children who swarm through the sewers - are worshiping not a figment of their deranged imaginations but a monstrous creature that actually lives below the city, below the subways: the Head Underneath. I just love that name, which hints at some sociopathic child's fantasy. Once this guy appears at the wonderfully gross and sadistic climax, there's no doubt Cellars is a vintage horror novel without apology. But then punk rock means never saying sorry.