By MICHAEL LOUIS CALVILLO (Burning Effigy Press; 2011)
It’s been said the ultimate compliment you can give a horror story is it makes you question its author’s sanity. I’ll confess that was the case with this deeply sick novella, meaning it’s a success.
This is the sixth book by the late Michael Louis Calvillo, and his third to be published in 2011. In true Calvillo fashion, it’s not really like anything else—if anything, it occupies (roughly) the same category as the author’s previous ‘11 novella BLEED FOR YOU, being a dark-humored gross-out far removed from more thoughtful Calvillo efforts like I WILL RISE and AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT. Yet taken on its own terms 7 BRAINS more than works, with a decidedly unique tone set by the dedication: “For Michelle (the author’s wife)…I promise I will never eat your brain.”
Unfortunately Malcolm, the protagonist of 7 BRAINS, makes no such promise. Not in the opening chapter (entitled “Food for Thought”) at least, when he inexplicably smashes in his wife’s skull and, under the guidance of a foreign accented voice in his head, ravenously devours his beloved’s brain.
It turns out the voice belongs to a split-off part of Malcolm’s psyche that’s concerned about him, and mankind in general, losing humanity. To regain Malcolm’s lost humanity his chatty alter ego—who Malcolm christens Einstein because it’s such a know-it-all—demands that Malcolm devour six more brains, each belonging to a person with specific attributes: ambition, innocence, love, honesty, benevolence and anger (Malcolm’s wife, it seems, represented desire). Going about this is obviously easier said than done, and involves a lot of unpleasantness.
Calvillo is to be commended for seeing his sick-assed premise through to its darkest limits (not to give anything away, but Malcolm’s wife isn’t the only member of his immediate family to fall prey to Einstein’s psychotic demands) while never losing sight of the underlying humor of the piece. Perhaps best of all, at just $8.00 it’s the first Calvillo book in some time that’s reasonably priced.