CUSTOM MADE SLAVES
Initially published as part of the aptly named Bizarre line of S&M themed erotica, this book has little to offer from a literary standpoint but is plenty wild.
THE CURSE OF LATOMBA
Here’s an interesting artifact I recently unearthed from my closet, a horror novel packaged as a tabloid newspaper, complete with (bogus) ads and photos. Printed in South Carolina by someone calling himself “Edward Hyde” (a pen name, obviously!), it’s a lurid, nasty, occasionally funny first person account of a cannibalistic serial killer named Edgar, told in the form of a lengthy letter he writes to a supermarket rag called “The Grapevine.” Here’s an interesting artifact I recently unearthed from my closet, a horror novel packaged as a tabloid newspaper, complete with (bogus) ads and photos. Printed in South Carolina by someone calling himself “Edward Hyde” (a pen name, obviously!), it’s a lurid, nasty, occasionally funny first person account of a cannibalistic serial killer named Edgar, told in the form of a lengthy letter he writes to a supermarket rag called “The Grapevine.”
ANYHOW STORIES
This remains one of the great curiosities of the Victorian era, a children’s book of considerable richness, bizarre, and not a little darkness. You’ll find few books of any sort with as strong a grasp of otherworldly apprehension as these “Anyhow Stories,” not all of which are explicitly horrific.
CUJO
CUJO carries Stephen King’s well-known penchant for bloat to hellacious extremes. It includes just about every extraneous detail you can think of.
CRIMSON ORGY
The first novel by Austin Williams, CRIMSON ORGY has a suitably nerdy framework: it opens and closes with articles about an obscure sixties era splatter epic called CRIMSON ORGY, which gained notoriety due to rumors that it contained footage of an actual killing. We learn what actually occurred during the making of CRIMSON ORGY in the bulk of the novel, and the production turns out to be every bit as sordid as it’s been cracked up to be.
CREEPERS
This fitfully trashy paperback original is viewed by many as a forerunner of the splatterpunk movement. Its gritty urban setting certainly sets it apart from most early-1980s horror fiction (and makes it something of a companion-piece to John Shirley’s CELLARS, which appeared the same year), although in truth CREEPERS isn’t nearly as subversive as its reputation suggests. Most of the book’s famed splatter, in fact, is confined to the final 30 pages.
CREATURES OF THE POOL
Of the thirty-some novels by Ramsey Campbell, this is only the second to be written in the first person.
CREATURE
An example of something that’s all too common in horror fiction: a paperback novel whose contents diverge quite radically from the packaging. That packaging portends a trashy horror fest a la Stephen King at his most lurid, and indeed the first half of the book delivers just that, with a naive English traveler finding himself stuck in a rural Austrian village. Eventually he enters a foreboding castle and discovers…something.
CRASH
There’s never been another novel like this one, and that includes those of its author, the brilliant James Graham Ballard. CRASH was adapted from a short piece that initially appeared in Ballard’s ATROCITY EXHIBITION (1969).
THE COUNTRY OF WOLVES
This gorgeously designed graphic novel fleshes out an ancient Inuit folktale.