Extreme Horror Review: David L. Tamarin’s This Book Hates You
Confession time: I like this gig.
Sure, it takes a lot of time and effort to write, all for little to no money – but writing for 1428 Elm gives me a reason to set aside time to watch some cool movies and TV shows, try out some new video games, and get my hands on some new books to dust off late at night – many of which I might not hear about otherwise.
Case in point: extreme horror writer David L. Tamarin’s This Book Hates You. I had not heard of Tamarin until this week, when I was forwarded an email by our director that had been sent out courtesy of Simply Legendary Publicity, the same folks who are promoting the indie flick North Woods.
A few quick emails later, and I was given copies of This Book Hates You and Hurting My Toys: Spiritual Suicide, Tamarin’s latest publications. I decided to go with the anthology, This Book Hates You, first, just because I am reading another novel and felt that short stories could be squeezed into my schedule quite easily.
Here we go!
Contents
This Book Hates You
Jesus Wept
Little Jimmy Wanted a Baseball
If They Could Write Back I: Satan
Snuff Movie Review
What Happens in the Attic
The Abortion People
The Jackson Family Good Times
If They Could Write Back II: Santa Claus
Attack of the Pudding People
Live Feed
Winter is Coming
A Fistful of Tumors
Interview With The Scream Queen
Gravity
If They Could Write Back III: God
All American Family Fun
Abducted and Probed
Robo-Porn Revenge
We Can All be Art
Octo-Mom and the Projectile Birth Contest
Head Blown Out
If They Could Write Back IV: Charles Manson
Obituary
Operations Gone Bad
Melting
Hurting My Toys
Life Has No Meaning
What Did You Do To The Children?
Pig
Nightmares of Aliens and Death
This Time They All Die
What You Should Expect
I included all of the names of the stories so you can get a good idea of what you’re getting into. Tamarin feels like these stories, which were written over a ten-year span, represent the best and most brutal writing that he produced during that time period. Be prepared for blood, rape, drug use, torture, rape, mutilation, blood, rape, senseless acts of violence against children, drug use, torture, alien probing, robot porn, mutilation, rape, and blood.
In that order!
Seriously: you’ll know pretty quickly if this is the sort of book for you. Any anthology that depicts Jesus Christ as a heroin-addicted junkie getting beat up in a filthy bathroom clearly isn’t ******* around; Tamarin’s going for your jugular, and he is not going to stop until you’re a bloody mess.
Give Tamarin credit: his imagination knows no bounds! From tiny toy soldiers that come to life and recreate a massacre straight out of the Vietnam War, to a vicious account of a serial killer inflicting extreme amounts of torture on his victims, to stories that involve robots and aliens doing things that I never really pictured robots and aliens doing, Tamarin keeps you off-balance, plot-wise. This is what your brain comes up with if you’re on ingesting lethal doses of PCP mixed with Drano, I think, and even within the stories themselves Tamarin’s imagination runs wild to the point where you really cannot classify the story as belonging to any one genre.
Personally, I preferred his shorter works, such as “Jesus Wept,” “We Can All be Art,” “Interview With the Scream Queen,” and all of the “If They Could Write Back” segments. For starters, as much as I appreciate a healthy imagination, I prefer to read stories in which the plot makes sense at some level. It seems like the longer Tamarin’s stories go on, the more he loses control. “Little Jimmy Wanted a Baseball” goes from being about a boy with a dead-beat dad wanting a baseball to a story involving the President of the United States nuking the town Jimmy lived in, because he hated Jimmy. Huh? You can load a story with all the violence you want, but if you write everything that pops into your head, the story just becomes silly – and horror ain’t silly.
Of course, there are flashes of intentional humor on display here, as well. “Interview With the Scream Queen” and all of the “If They Could Write Back” segments showcase Tamarin’s dark sense of humor perfectly, and you have to think that many of his more extreme and bizarre depictions of violence are more satirical than anything.
As for the “assault on your senses” approach to loading every story with as much violent imagery and brutality as possible – there’s times when it works, but more often than not, I found myself skimming. It all blends together. Extreme violence shocks the most when it is used in realistic situations, in short bursts. Set that violence to full auto and just hold the trigger, though, and you wind up missing your target and spraying a bunch of bullets harmlessly into the air.
All in all, I found This Book Hates You to be a hit-and-miss affair . . . but considering you can buy the Kindle version of this book on Amazon.com for only $2.99, any hits you get make it worth the money. If extreme horror is your thing, then David L. Tamarin is your guy, so follow him on Facebook and throw some money his way!