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apathy's review
dark
funny
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Holy shit!
I've recently gotten into the Splatterpunk genre and I stumbled upon the "A Glimpse Into Hell" series by Wade H. Garrett while finding some potential audiobooks within the genre to listen to. Boy, was I in for a ride.
Now, I'm a big fan of over the top gore/horror movies like Hostel or the Terrifier series, but they PALE in comparison to having all of the details in a book. You can have bad writing in a book, but the special effects you create in your head can greatly outweigh what a movie can provide, especially a mainstream one.
The writing in this book helps to create the effects because of the detailed story writing. I've gotta take my cowboy hat off to Wade because this is one of the most detailed books I've ever experienced. And I say experience because, for my first splatterpunk book, this was an experience.
The content of the book isn't difficult to understand. It's just simple torture from our main protagonist (?) Seth Coker. I shouldn't use the term "simple" as some of the ways he inflicts pain and suffering onto the low lives he catches are so technical and gruesome. While listening to this book, I wondered what went through Wade H. Garrett's head while writing this because it can be elaborate.
The plot twists in this novel are great and well thought out. At least, I thought so!
This book can also be very comedic at times - Seth Coker should consider being a comedian as another job to help himself look more innocent.
This book was insane and I'm glad that it was my first experience into the Splatterpunk genre. I'm definitely going to be listening to the rest of the books from "A Glimpse Into Hell".
I've recently gotten into the Splatterpunk genre and I stumbled upon the "A Glimpse Into Hell" series by Wade H. Garrett while finding some potential audiobooks within the genre to listen to. Boy, was I in for a ride.
Now, I'm a big fan of over the top gore/horror movies like Hostel or the Terrifier series, but they PALE in comparison to having all of the details in a book. You can have bad writing in a book, but the special effects you create in your head can greatly outweigh what a movie can provide, especially a mainstream one.
The writing in this book helps to create the effects because of the detailed story writing. I've gotta take my cowboy hat off to Wade because this is one of the most detailed books I've ever experienced. And I say experience because, for my first splatterpunk book, this was an experience.
The content of the book isn't difficult to understand. It's just simple torture from our main protagonist (?) Seth Coker. I shouldn't use the term "simple" as some of the ways he inflicts pain and suffering onto the low lives he catches are so technical and gruesome. While listening to this book, I wondered what went through Wade H. Garrett's head while writing this because it can be elaborate.
The plot twists in this novel are great and well thought out. At least, I thought so!
This book can also be very comedic at times - Seth Coker should consider being a comedian as another job to help himself look more innocent.
This book was insane and I'm glad that it was my first experience into the Splatterpunk genre. I'm definitely going to be listening to the rest of the books from "A Glimpse Into Hell".
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Pedophilia, Sexual assault, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Body horror, Cursing, Death, Drug use, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Excrement, Gore, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Medical content, Medical trauma, Murder, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual content, Stalking, Torture, Suicide attempt, Violence, and Vomit
Moderate: Fire/Fire injury, Mass/school shootings, Ableism, Racism, Child abuse, Adult/minor relationship, Body shaming, Child death, Homophobia, and Racial slurs
Minor: Alcohol, Car accident, Gun violence, and Death of parent
sea_caummisar's review against another edition
5.0
This is page after page of gore and then more gore. We get the story of what each person did to deserve such torture. In the background, the torturer is telling these stories to someone who doesn't understand why they're there. We do find out. Eventually
kikis_a_book_wh0r3's review against another edition
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
I wish someone would have posted a spoiler review. So imma do it for the next person who gets to a point where you find the story redundant and sounding like it was written by a middle schooler writing an essay but trying to be "edgy" to shock his teacher.
I would like to preface this by saying I am NOT a novice to splatterpunk or extreme horror. Nothing about this book gave me the ick or made me want to stop reading because it was "too extreme" or because im "PC". Wrath James White, Aron Beauregard, Kristopher Triana, CM Guidroz and CJ Leede are amongst my favorite authors of all time. So this review is not coming from a misunderstanding of the genre.
With that said:
Dicky's name is Chuck. Chuck's son Jason and two of his friends attack a guy and a girl in the woods, kills the girl and leaves the guy stuck to a tree with a knife. Chuck is the sheriff and helps his son Jason and Jason's two friends get rid of evidence and made up alibi so they wouldnt get caught for what they did. The guy.... was Seth. The last two stories Seth tells using nicknames are Jason and his two friends. Seth's torture for Chuck is to remain locked in the cell in front of where his son and his friends are being tortured and watch his son be tortured.
After you find this out, a cop knocks at the door and comes in to talk to Seth and Seth recognizes the cop as the person who killed his parents in a car accident and he attacks the cop taking him down to the torture chamber ...queue Book 2: Angel of Death.
Youre welcome.
If you are wondering what this dude does for a living to have all this medical knowledge and equipment and mechanical knowledge and seemingly endless money... he was in contruction, then started in a cabinet shop, then opened his own wood shop. And apparently we are supposed to believe he has the money for all this stuff.
Garrett writes essentially the same story over and over and over in this book. Its entirely too repetitive, and there is NOTHING in his writing that gives good imagery to immerse you in the story or to feel like youre watching the scenes unfold. There is no sense of dread after the first two stories Seth tells because its all the same. When I first started this book I was so excited... it was extreme and it was gory. Then just was on repeat. Every prisoner calls him a sick f*** and threatens to kill him and tells him he wont get away with it. They all somehow speak clearly even with their tongues stretched, hooked, or nailed.
Seth has unlimited knowledge and skills and money apparently since he can rig cars to be remote, devices to stall cars, machines that keep patients in comas and moving during it, afford torture contraptions, keep many people barely alive, has access to medical drugs and equipment, tattoo intricate tattoos on victims, and despite unsanitary conditions of the surrounding...implements sanitation on tools and victims??
So many holes in this story. I tried to find a spoiler online and couldnt find one so i was forced to read the whole book. So now im leaving this review to save anyone like me who finds it boring and repetitive.
I would like to preface this by saying I am NOT a novice to splatterpunk or extreme horror. Nothing about this book gave me the ick or made me want to stop reading because it was "too extreme" or because im "PC". Wrath James White, Aron Beauregard, Kristopher Triana, CM Guidroz and CJ Leede are amongst my favorite authors of all time. So this review is not coming from a misunderstanding of the genre.
With that said:
Dicky's name is Chuck. Chuck's son Jason and two of his friends attack a guy and a girl in the woods, kills the girl and leaves the guy stuck to a tree with a knife. Chuck is the sheriff and helps his son Jason and Jason's two friends get rid of evidence and made up alibi so they wouldnt get caught for what they did. The guy.... was Seth. The last two stories Seth tells using nicknames are Jason and his two friends. Seth's torture for Chuck is to remain locked in the cell in front of where his son and his friends are being tortured and watch his son be tortured.
After you find this out, a cop knocks at the door and comes in to talk to Seth and Seth recognizes the cop as the person who killed his parents in a car accident and he attacks the cop taking him down to the torture chamber ...queue Book 2: Angel of Death.
Youre welcome.
If you are wondering what this dude does for a living to have all this medical knowledge and equipment and mechanical knowledge and seemingly endless money... he was in contruction, then started in a cabinet shop, then opened his own wood shop. And apparently we are supposed to believe he has the money for all this stuff.
Garrett writes essentially the same story over and over and over in this book. Its entirely too repetitive, and there is NOTHING in his writing that gives good imagery to immerse you in the story or to feel like youre watching the scenes unfold. There is no sense of dread after the first two stories Seth tells because its all the same. When I first started this book I was so excited... it was extreme and it was gory. Then just was on repeat. Every prisoner calls him a sick f*** and threatens to kill him and tells him he wont get away with it. They all somehow speak clearly even with their tongues stretched, hooked, or nailed.
Seth has unlimited knowledge and skills and money apparently since he can rig cars to be remote, devices to stall cars, machines that keep patients in comas and moving during it, afford torture contraptions, keep many people barely alive, has access to medical drugs and equipment, tattoo intricate tattoos on victims, and despite unsanitary conditions of the surrounding...implements sanitation on tools and victims??
So many holes in this story. I tried to find a spoiler online and couldnt find one so i was forced to read the whole book. So now im leaving this review to save anyone like me who finds it boring and repetitive.
modernzorker's review against another edition
3.0
The Angel of Vengeance is Garrett's first novel, and the premiere of a quintology he's labeled "A Glimpse Into Hell". All five books revolve around one man's quest to punish those who, in his eyes, have evaded justice. Whether they've carried on their evil deeds without being caught, lucked into it thanks to an incompetent prosecutor, bought their way via highly-paid defense lawyers, or shimmied through a crack in the system thanks to police error, the virtue of being under-age, or a jury more sympathetic to the plight of a thug than the sorrow of a wronged family doesn't matter. Seth Coker believes in equal opportunity, and that means if you cause undue harm or suffering to another human being, you should have the equal opportunity to share in their misery.
Coker operates his own underground hideout, allowing him to go about his work undetected and unmolested by the outside world. Careful to a fault, he's frustrated cops in multiple states with his ability to track down his prey, subject them to hours of unspeakable agonies, then leave their remains for detectives to puzzle over...and the ones the police find were lucky.
The unlucky ones, the child molesters, gang bangers, murderers, rapists, low-lifes, and druggies? They get dragged back to Coker's hellhole, where his knowledge of medicine, biology, and anatomy along with his awe-inspiring cache of everything from simple gardening tools and fishing equipment to acquisitions from medical supply companies, machine shops, and finer hardware stores everywhere ensure the torment can last for weeks, months, or even longer depending on their sins. Once Coker has you, death is your only escape. You can beg, plead, cajole, bribe, and threaten--it won't matter. Coker's The Angel of Vengeance, and he and he alone decides when you've had enough.
Spoiler alert: you've never had enough.
Poor Dicky's one of the unlucky few to earn himself a caged residency in Coker's torture chamber. He's not sure what he's done to deserve it (he's never killed anybody, never committed a sex crime, never even broken the law as far as he's aware), and Coker's in no hurry to explain. Instead, Dicky (and by extension the reader) is getting the E-Ticket treatment: a fully-guided show 'n' tell of Coker's oubliette, with a long, loving, detailed-down-to-the-last-testicle-rupture explanation of the who's, the why's, and (most importantly) the what's and how's of Seth's previous guests, not all of whom have hit their expiration dates.
After that, it's Dicky's turn...
If you're like me, the first thing you thought to yourself upon reading the description was, "A Dexter knockoff torture-porn crossover." You wouldn't be far wrong. The main difference is Dexter's intention isn't to punish, but to purify. He avenges a very specific crime and pursues a very specific kind of criminal, one who is utterly beyond redemption. Seth Coker, on the other hand, is interested in nothing beyond his desire to update Dante's Divine Comedy and the Spanish Inquisition for 21st centuryaesthetics. Strip Batman of his code of ethics while retaining the rest of his crime-fighting abilities and access to gear, and you'd get Coker almost to a T -- it wouldn't surprise me to learn this is what inspired Garrett in the first place.
You can tell Garrett's absolutely in love with the idea and his main character. He's got quite an imagination for ways to punish evildoers in his Stygian cellar, and there's no denying most of these assholes (as well as the garden-variety turds he occasionally frags for the lulz) are deserving. The difference between most of humanity and Garrett is that we may fantasize for a few hours about doing obscene things to the guy who beat a murder rap, and then forget about it.
Garrett doesn't forget.
The Angel of Vengeance is not for the faint-hearted or weak-stomached, and it very well may deserve the moniker of "most gruesome series on the market", but before you rush out to grab it for your Kindle, you need to know something else. While Garrett's imagination for inventive ways to break bones and spill body fluids is limitless, his writing skill is not.
I don't want people to get the wrong idea here: I'm not tearing into him as a bad writer; he's finding his success on the indie circuit, so more power to him. But as a reviewer I'd be amiss in failing to mention the book's flaws, and they are legion.
Garrett's stated publicly he doesn't read other fiction writers, preferring to stick with non-fiction stuff both for personal edification and research, and unfortunately it shows. All authors need a style, but it's something they develop over years of careful refinement, by studying, borrowing, swapping out, improving as they see how others do things and adapting for the times. Garrett admits he doesn't do this, nor does he have editors or proofreaders beyond what people on the internet help him with voluntarily, and again, it's obvious. His style reads like a high school creative writing student who has discovered how fun it is to tell stories for the first time, but hasn't learned the difference between flow and ramble. Remember back to anything you wrote in tenth grade, and unless you were Isaac Asimov, you'd agree it wasn't exactly up to publishing house standards.
Garrett's story is compelling, but it's compelling in a 'scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel' way, along the same lines as watching dash-cam accident footage. Much like Tommy Wiseau's The Room, it's compelling simply because it exists, not necessarily because it's good.
Every creative writer on the face of the planet is familiar with the adage "Show, don't tell," but The Angel of Vengeance is a never-ending stream of tell, after tell, after tell. This is a result of the technique Garrett chose for his narrative, which consists of Seth Coker explaining to the kidnapped Dicky who he is and what he does. Lots of other stories take "relating an incident to another person" as a way of conveying information to the audience, but Garrett, as virtually all beginning writers do, struggles with passive voice, a profusion of adverbs, and an ear for dialog that, while not exactly tin, still leaves one cringing. It's bad enough when one of his characters won't shut up; it's worse when said character manages to somehow talk in full, complete, coherent sentences even after Coker's subjected him to the kind of abuse that would render a man incapable of forming coherent thoughts through the resultant miasma of pain. Coker's victims aren't supposed to be sympathetic, but they are supposed to be people -- it's not too much to ask they behave like real ones instead of actors reading lines, is it?
The Saw franchise works on a similar premise, but to understand the difference, imagine that instead of watching the struggles of the people enmeshed in Jigsaw's schemes, the fight for survival, and the ingenious brutality of each crafted trap, the audience was instead subjected to John Kramer relating what happened to a certain victim without the visuals. The 'reverse bear trap' is horrifying for two reasons: first is its intention, which is to tear a person's head apart by forcibly prying the jaws until they separate; the other is because we see, first-hand, what it does to the person so entrapped should they fail to get out. We can hear someone explain to us verbally how the contraption functions, but words can never supplement the pure horror of the demonstration Amanda watches on the screen.
Garrett, sadly, shows no sense of understanding that both are required to truly horrify, so he spends pages and pages having Seth tell Dicky what he did to his victims, and not one single paragraph showing us instead. Here's an example from early in the book, when Coker's describing the scene the morning after he's subjected his first victim to a round of abuse (a thorough beating via brass knuckles):
Yes, the scene he's painting is an awful one, but it's painted it with brushes so broad they could mark traffic lanes. He's telling what happened, thus instead of reading like a scene out of a horror novel, it reads like a page from a police report. There's no emotion in this. There's no reader engagement. It's gore porn (gorn?), but it's amateur gorn. Four hundred-plus pages of it with no changes or improvements in style.
If that's what you're looking for, if that's the mood you're in, if that's all it takes to entertain you, then you're already loading The Angel of Vengeance and its four sequels into your e-reader right now, and there's not a damn thing wrong with that. There's a market for it, Garrett's found it, and it goes down easier once you realize you're buying into the fantasies of a guy who's still a neophyte at his craft.
But if you looked at that cover, the tag line, or the five-star reviews on Amazon or Goodreads and thought you stumbled upon the second-coming of extreme horror, maybe found the guy who could give Wrath James White nightmares, break Edward Lee's psyche, and make Ryan Harding puke up his guts, you'll want to look elsewhere. Garrett's a one-trick pony. It's a fine trick, trailblazing in its own right, and it's earned him a following, but it's middle-of-the-road in plot and total amateur hour in its wooden execution. Take away the prolonged torture sessions and inventive punishments dispensed by Coker and you'd struggle to find any real story despite the page count. It's packed with imaginative, if rote, recitations of brutality inflicted upon the human body, and the results thereof, but hamstrung by clunky dialog, lack of a good editor, a running time that could have been cut in half, and no real reason to exist except as a rough concept which other, better authors will mine, polish, and craft into something worthy of turning the Extreme Horror genre on its fucked up ear.
No nominations for most disturbing scene this time around. The book's basically one unending orgy of bone-breaking, eye-gouging, genital-sawing, anus-penetrating, limb-amputating, teeth-shattering, nail-pounding, flesh-burning, finger-stripping, hair-pulling, face-melting, blood-vomiting, back-breaking, organ-penetrating, squeal-like-a-piggy-boy-demanding carnage. Flip to a page at random and you'll find depictions of something awful happening, having just happened, or about to happen.
Two weeping eye sockets out of five for the average reader; four out of five for people willing to give themselves completely to the fantasy of Coker's Judge, Jury, and Executioner persona and also willing to overlook the flaws noted above. I've averaged it to a 3-star rating for purposes of this review here.
In closing, I feel a need to point out Garrett's obsession with the word 'wiener'. Seriously, there are half a million slang terms for the male genitals that don't sound like a third-grade playground insult, but big, bad Seth Coker just loves taking about wieners. If this was intentional, then I give the author a high five for making me giggle every time he does it. If it was accidental, then I dunno, man...Urban Thesaurus has seventeen pages' worth of synonyms for a dude's junk. Maybe give a few of them a try every so often?
Coker operates his own underground hideout, allowing him to go about his work undetected and unmolested by the outside world. Careful to a fault, he's frustrated cops in multiple states with his ability to track down his prey, subject them to hours of unspeakable agonies, then leave their remains for detectives to puzzle over...and the ones the police find were lucky.
The unlucky ones, the child molesters, gang bangers, murderers, rapists, low-lifes, and druggies? They get dragged back to Coker's hellhole, where his knowledge of medicine, biology, and anatomy along with his awe-inspiring cache of everything from simple gardening tools and fishing equipment to acquisitions from medical supply companies, machine shops, and finer hardware stores everywhere ensure the torment can last for weeks, months, or even longer depending on their sins. Once Coker has you, death is your only escape. You can beg, plead, cajole, bribe, and threaten--it won't matter. Coker's The Angel of Vengeance, and he and he alone decides when you've had enough.
Spoiler alert: you've never had enough.
Poor Dicky's one of the unlucky few to earn himself a caged residency in Coker's torture chamber. He's not sure what he's done to deserve it (he's never killed anybody, never committed a sex crime, never even broken the law as far as he's aware), and Coker's in no hurry to explain. Instead, Dicky (and by extension the reader) is getting the E-Ticket treatment: a fully-guided show 'n' tell of Coker's oubliette, with a long, loving, detailed-down-to-the-last-testicle-rupture explanation of the who's, the why's, and (most importantly) the what's and how's of Seth's previous guests, not all of whom have hit their expiration dates.
After that, it's Dicky's turn...
If you're like me, the first thing you thought to yourself upon reading the description was, "A Dexter knockoff torture-porn crossover." You wouldn't be far wrong. The main difference is Dexter's intention isn't to punish, but to purify. He avenges a very specific crime and pursues a very specific kind of criminal, one who is utterly beyond redemption. Seth Coker, on the other hand, is interested in nothing beyond his desire to update Dante's Divine Comedy and the Spanish Inquisition for 21st centuryaesthetics. Strip Batman of his code of ethics while retaining the rest of his crime-fighting abilities and access to gear, and you'd get Coker almost to a T -- it wouldn't surprise me to learn this is what inspired Garrett in the first place.
You can tell Garrett's absolutely in love with the idea and his main character. He's got quite an imagination for ways to punish evildoers in his Stygian cellar, and there's no denying most of these assholes (as well as the garden-variety turds he occasionally frags for the lulz) are deserving. The difference between most of humanity and Garrett is that we may fantasize for a few hours about doing obscene things to the guy who beat a murder rap, and then forget about it.
Garrett doesn't forget.
The Angel of Vengeance is not for the faint-hearted or weak-stomached, and it very well may deserve the moniker of "most gruesome series on the market", but before you rush out to grab it for your Kindle, you need to know something else. While Garrett's imagination for inventive ways to break bones and spill body fluids is limitless, his writing skill is not.
I don't want people to get the wrong idea here: I'm not tearing into him as a bad writer; he's finding his success on the indie circuit, so more power to him. But as a reviewer I'd be amiss in failing to mention the book's flaws, and they are legion.
Garrett's stated publicly he doesn't read other fiction writers, preferring to stick with non-fiction stuff both for personal edification and research, and unfortunately it shows. All authors need a style, but it's something they develop over years of careful refinement, by studying, borrowing, swapping out, improving as they see how others do things and adapting for the times. Garrett admits he doesn't do this, nor does he have editors or proofreaders beyond what people on the internet help him with voluntarily, and again, it's obvious. His style reads like a high school creative writing student who has discovered how fun it is to tell stories for the first time, but hasn't learned the difference between flow and ramble. Remember back to anything you wrote in tenth grade, and unless you were Isaac Asimov, you'd agree it wasn't exactly up to publishing house standards.
Garrett's story is compelling, but it's compelling in a 'scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel' way, along the same lines as watching dash-cam accident footage. Much like Tommy Wiseau's The Room, it's compelling simply because it exists, not necessarily because it's good.
Every creative writer on the face of the planet is familiar with the adage "Show, don't tell," but The Angel of Vengeance is a never-ending stream of tell, after tell, after tell. This is a result of the technique Garrett chose for his narrative, which consists of Seth Coker explaining to the kidnapped Dicky who he is and what he does. Lots of other stories take "relating an incident to another person" as a way of conveying information to the audience, but Garrett, as virtually all beginning writers do, struggles with passive voice, a profusion of adverbs, and an ear for dialog that, while not exactly tin, still leaves one cringing. It's bad enough when one of his characters won't shut up; it's worse when said character manages to somehow talk in full, complete, coherent sentences even after Coker's subjected him to the kind of abuse that would render a man incapable of forming coherent thoughts through the resultant miasma of pain. Coker's victims aren't supposed to be sympathetic, but they are supposed to be people -- it's not too much to ask they behave like real ones instead of actors reading lines, is it?
The Saw franchise works on a similar premise, but to understand the difference, imagine that instead of watching the struggles of the people enmeshed in Jigsaw's schemes, the fight for survival, and the ingenious brutality of each crafted trap, the audience was instead subjected to John Kramer relating what happened to a certain victim without the visuals. The 'reverse bear trap' is horrifying for two reasons: first is its intention, which is to tear a person's head apart by forcibly prying the jaws until they separate; the other is because we see, first-hand, what it does to the person so entrapped should they fail to get out. We can hear someone explain to us verbally how the contraption functions, but words can never supplement the pure horror of the demonstration Amanda watches on the screen.
Garrett, sadly, shows no sense of understanding that both are required to truly horrify, so he spends pages and pages having Seth tell Dicky what he did to his victims, and not one single paragraph showing us instead. Here's an example from early in the book, when Coker's describing the scene the morning after he's subjected his first victim to a round of abuse (a thorough beating via brass knuckles):
"The next evening when I came back, I found Larry slumped over like a limp noodle. He was so exhausted and weak from the loss of blood that he didn’t even have the energy to hold himself up. He was hideous looking. His face looked like one big bruise and his entire head and body were severely swollen and stained with dry blood. His front teeth were missing, and the broken pieces were scattered all over the blood and vomit covered floor. His lips were busted open and swollen about four times their normal size and I could see his gums through the large open gashes. His arms and hands were so busted up and swollen they were unnatural looking. One of his eyes had ruptured and the massive amount of swelling had caused it to grotesquely protrude from its socket to the point it looked as if it was going to fall out. His other one was almost swollen shut, but he could still see. I was actually amazed he was still alive."
Yes, the scene he's painting is an awful one, but it's painted it with brushes so broad they could mark traffic lanes. He's telling what happened, thus instead of reading like a scene out of a horror novel, it reads like a page from a police report. There's no emotion in this. There's no reader engagement. It's gore porn (gorn?), but it's amateur gorn. Four hundred-plus pages of it with no changes or improvements in style.
If that's what you're looking for, if that's the mood you're in, if that's all it takes to entertain you, then you're already loading The Angel of Vengeance and its four sequels into your e-reader right now, and there's not a damn thing wrong with that. There's a market for it, Garrett's found it, and it goes down easier once you realize you're buying into the fantasies of a guy who's still a neophyte at his craft.
But if you looked at that cover, the tag line, or the five-star reviews on Amazon or Goodreads and thought you stumbled upon the second-coming of extreme horror, maybe found the guy who could give Wrath James White nightmares, break Edward Lee's psyche, and make Ryan Harding puke up his guts, you'll want to look elsewhere. Garrett's a one-trick pony. It's a fine trick, trailblazing in its own right, and it's earned him a following, but it's middle-of-the-road in plot and total amateur hour in its wooden execution. Take away the prolonged torture sessions and inventive punishments dispensed by Coker and you'd struggle to find any real story despite the page count. It's packed with imaginative, if rote, recitations of brutality inflicted upon the human body, and the results thereof, but hamstrung by clunky dialog, lack of a good editor, a running time that could have been cut in half, and no real reason to exist except as a rough concept which other, better authors will mine, polish, and craft into something worthy of turning the Extreme Horror genre on its fucked up ear.
No nominations for most disturbing scene this time around. The book's basically one unending orgy of bone-breaking, eye-gouging, genital-sawing, anus-penetrating, limb-amputating, teeth-shattering, nail-pounding, flesh-burning, finger-stripping, hair-pulling, face-melting, blood-vomiting, back-breaking, organ-penetrating, squeal-like-a-piggy-boy-demanding carnage. Flip to a page at random and you'll find depictions of something awful happening, having just happened, or about to happen.
Two weeping eye sockets out of five for the average reader; four out of five for people willing to give themselves completely to the fantasy of Coker's Judge, Jury, and Executioner persona and also willing to overlook the flaws noted above. I've averaged it to a 3-star rating for purposes of this review here.
In closing, I feel a need to point out Garrett's obsession with the word 'wiener'. Seriously, there are half a million slang terms for the male genitals that don't sound like a third-grade playground insult, but big, bad Seth Coker just loves taking about wieners. If this was intentional, then I give the author a high five for making me giggle every time he does it. If it was accidental, then I dunno, man...Urban Thesaurus has seventeen pages' worth of synonyms for a dude's junk. Maybe give a few of them a try every so often?
larsvassy's review against another edition
5.0
Definitely my favorite hardcore horror series! I love Mr. Garrett's sick mind, I don't think I could ever get enough!
ana_space's review against another edition
5.0
I didn't know I needed such a book until I read this. It's therapeutic to know the monsters he takes truly suffer by the end of their lives. Tbh I hope there's a Seth out there somewhere irl.
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