KEEP THE RIVER ON YOUR RIGHT
This is one of the most famous anthropological accounts in existence, and also one of the most misunderstood.
NIGHT IN THE LONESOME OCTOBER
Like quite a few (if not most) of Laymon’s novels, it pivots on horny young people, is related in startlingly immediate minute-by-minute fashion, and is a damn satisfying read overall.
MIDNIGHT’S LAIR
MIDNIGHT’S LAIR isn’t my favorite novel by the late Richard Laymon, but it is compact, fast moving and imaginative in the best Laymon tradition.
Mantids
Get this: somewhere in the skuzzier regions of Astoria, Oregon a failed musician is afflicted with a permanent erection while having to contend with human-sized preying mantises, which include the hero’s own wife
JOKO’S ANNIVERSARY
Maybe this obscure exercise in European absurdism doesn’t belong in a horror book review, but it does contain generous helpings of mutilation, cannibalism and demonic possession.
JEANNE’S JOURNAL
Those lucky few who’ve read Arlette Ryvers’ translation of JEANNE’S JOURNAL all seem to exhibit similarly awe-struck reactions, and having finally gotten around to experiencing this pervy masterwork myself, I fully understand the adulation.
FROM INSIDE
As a veritable epic of sustained surreality this graphic novel is fairly remarkable.
THE EYES
It’s the first and thus far only English language collection of stories by the late Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta, the so-called “Andalusian de Sade” who specialized in scatological excess.
EAT HIM IF YOU LIKE
Definitely one for the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category, a novelized account of the “Affaire de Hautefaye” that occurred on August 16, 1870.
THE DEVIL’S POPESS
This wild and strange novella was initially published in French back in 1931. According to the 1999 introduction by Alastair Brotchie, the accredited authors “Jehan Sylvius” and “Pierre de Ruysnes” are pseudonymous; its actual authors may or may not be the surrealist scribes Robert Desnos and Ernest de Gengenbach. As Brotchie smartly concludes, “Whoever the authors were, they evidently enjoyed themselves.”