THE SKIN TRADE
Introduced by Douglas Winter
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Browsing the list of titles reviewed in this premier issue of Skinned Alive, was there ever any doubt as to which one would be 1st?

The Skin Trade is actually the paperback release of Night Visions 5. The Night Visions series incidentally, is a show-case for three name-brand authors (more or less) of horror. Each is given 30000 words (about 100 pages) to play with. They can write short stories, novelettes, a mixture of these or 1 novella. Me thinks it's a great idea.

At the party this time are Stephen King, Dan Simmons and George R.R. Martin. George Martin by the way edited Night Visions 3 (released in Oz sans the '3'), and featured Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle and the ubiquitous Mr. Barker with 'The Hellbound Heart'. Try to track it down.

After the intro by Winter (lawyer by day – horror critic, Italian Zombie aficionardo and Skinny Puppy fan by night), Steve King gives us 'The Reploids': a quirky Twilight Zoneish tale about the night Jimmy Carson is replaced by a host from a parallel universe. 'Sneakers' is a bit better – a subtlely unnerving haunted shithouse (to quote King!) story where a young sound mixer notices a pair of sneakers below the same stall each time he visits. In true King style we're taunted till the end when yes, he finally throws the toilet door open. Lastly there's 'Dedication', a vaguely sickening witchcraft yarn...skip it!

Dan Simmons won the World Fantasy award for best novel with his first book The Song of Kali (reviewed in a future issue!). His stories 'Metastasis', 'Vanna Fucci is Alive and Well and Living in Hell' and 'Iverson's Pits' are three reasons why. His prose seems to hum with electricity; it's smooth and graphic. This writer is going to kick butt very soon, if not already!

George R.R. Martin goes against the grain with his novella 'The Skin Trade'. Why anyone with his talent would ever consider writing a werewolf tale is beyond me! But anyway after a slow first two-thirds it spreads the juice when people are found chained to their beds: skinned alive (right on!) by someone or something. It gets better towards the end which is a modest but totally satisfying bloodbath. A great way to end a great book!

RESURRECTION DREAMS
Richard Laymon
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Samhain described this novel as disgusting, gross, depraved...etc. I don't know about you but I was convinced to check this shit out!

For writers like Laymon whose style does not offer much to chew on between the sex and gore (aka the good parts) this combo needs to be spreadthick, as in his entry in The Book of the Dead. I'm not saying there's nothing of merit at all in Resurrection Dreams, but it's too sparse and when it does arrive, too weak. (Umm, to be honest it does have one memorable scene!)

Much teased Melvin decides to play a prank at a school science project turn-out. He digs up the corpse of a 'gal' decapitated when she and her boyfriend slammed a bridge in his car at high velocity. The cause of the prang became apparent when someone (according to rumours) found a severed dick in the cheerleader's severed head! Melvin's project involves her corpse and his pathetic attempt to galvanize it back to life. However he only succeeds in giving Vicki (Melvin's part-time sympathetic girlfriend) nightmares when the girl's re-stuck head casually falls off and rolls toward her. I don't know why that would give anyone nightmares (!) but anyhow years later Vicki returns to the town (an M.D. graduate) to discover Melvin has also graduated...from the Luny bin. He still has a crush on Vicki and, you guessed it, reanimating stiffs.

What follows is Melvin re-attempting resurrections, Vicki chasing a lawyer, Vicki trying to shake Melvin's affections and finally his insane plans. He gets pretty pissed off when he learns that she hates his guts – his reaction/revenge is the best part of a book that isn't worth your time and dollars.

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
Edited by Skipp and Spector
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"...he could feel the ring of the vaginal muscle increasing pressure... When he felt the muscle sever his penis like a wire cutter, he began to scream hoarsely." Nice huh? Hows about this: "The girl who must've been skinned alive knelt beside his head, scaping maggots off her belly and stuffing them by the handful into his mouth." Impressed? This collection of 16 zombie stories must be the best slab of fiction I've read since...?

Here's a rundown of the well known writers: Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, Richard Laymon, Ed Bryant, Douglas E. Winter, Nicholas Royale, David Schow and last but by no means least Joe R. Lansdale. There is no doubting it – this is a splatterpunk orgy!

True, Campbell again gives another goreless piece, and there's three other slow stories, one of them surprisingly by King. The others are by Glen Vasey and Nicholas Royale. But shit, the rest make up for these in blazing, gut-ripping, gore-lorious Technicolor splatter!

Lansdale's superb 'On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks' (great title) is worth the $8.95 price alone. I ain't joking. Richard Laymon's 'Mess Hall' makes Fulci's Zombie look paraplegic. The self-decapitated souls in Steve Rasnic Tem's nervous 'Bodies and Heads' eat severed heads...with their genitals! In 'The Good Parts' by Les Daniels a zombie's daughter sinks into her fat father's rotted body. Robert McCammon delivers a very beautiful, lovely, horrifying and poetic short titled 'Eat Me'; and Douglas Winter gives his version of Less Than Zero as 'Less Than Zombie'. Not to mention the story by David Schow 'Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy' that would send the Shitfeast crew ape!

Length-wise there's three novelettes, the rest are shorts. Total length is 390 pages. George Romero and Skipp & Spector give cool introductions as well. A Killer!

TORTURE TOMB
C. Dean Andersson
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Here's a pulp book for those of us who thought Bloodsucking Freaks and Mark of the Devil were too limp! (I only saw Mark of the Devil recently. Excellent stuff! A bit like those old Hollywood costume dramas with impeccably authentic 17th Century sets, but written and directed by Jess Franco. Anyone seen the other sequel?)

Even though Torture Tomb's plot is secondary to the sadism, I'll give it space anyway. Bernice Sanders is kidnapped by white slavers who enjoy making snuff videos for well paying clients. Their latest is 'Torture Tomb' and is to star Bernice in her first and probably last role. Paul Danelli (one of the trio making the film) also nominates his wife for a bit part.

Bernice does have help in the form of her sister Gina and Gina's old lover Jim Brock (also into bondage!). They in turn use witches who use psychic visions of Bernice in peril to finally track her down. Unfortunately for Bernice this takes the entire length of the novel! So in the meantime she's subjected to several medieval (and not so medieval) tortures, and is raped by her captors just to break the monotony.

From the depictions of each torture scene you realise that C. Dean Andersson is partial to bondage games himself! Bernice's first scene is on that hoary old fave The Rack (note – she wears the same costume for each episode: nothing). In the video she is accused of being a witch and is therefore being made to confess, then according to the script is to burn at the stake. Being suspended on the rack is bad enough but then she has to endure nipple vices and lashes at the same time! The other women June is made to 'sit' on the dreaded Horse – a wooden plank resting several feet above the floor on its barely two inch edge. The tied victim straddles the top edge, feet off the floor...very painful. Worst of all is the chair: a metal monster with short spikes on its upper sides, steel braces for arms and legs, and a tray underneath the seat for a fire. Once the seat heats up the victim struggles against the spikes while thumb/toe screws are applied. Bernice gets all this, and more.

On the whole this is a nice little voyeuristic package that's a great companion for all you train-travelers out there whose laptop computers are having a sickie.

THE DEEP RED HORROR HANDBOOK
Edited by Chas. Balun
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To tell you the truth I was going to review this meaty gold nugget next issue, but by the time I had hit the back cover (and bounced!) I knew it had to be here.

Myth & Murder is first up. It's a Dario Argento essay so thoroughly in-depth that the mere mention of words like 'giallo', 'razor' or 'Goblin' will make you throw up violently! I loved it, and so did my dictionary.

Olde Worlde Horrors is a chapter devoted to Italian gothic and not-so-gothic celluloid landmarks. The author explores the roots seeded by early Italian splatterians and credits the gore-sprees of the early sixties, thru to the eighties as being influenced and sustained by the likes of Bava, Fulci, Ruggero and well, you know who they are.

Trans-Atlantic Terror Trends details the sordid censorshit problems that plague British fans. I swear, Australian censorshit is looking better-n-better when compared to the U.K. and U.S.A. The fact that these English-speaking countries (including Oz) alone have glaringly contradictory censorpolicies proves how arbitrary and useless they are.

The Third World Cannibal Films is a nicely packaged retrospective look at all Italian jungle epics. Like the Argento piece it's millimetres away from being the final word on the subject. All it needed were some colour still of Cannibaldom's most famous chow-downs.

I Spit in Your Face: Films that Bite could have only been written by Chas. Balun. Here he drags the swamps for rotting slabs of film like Last House on Dead End Street, Combat Shock, Last House on the Left, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Nekromantik (I nearly have a full house, except for that first card).

Behind all of the above guts is an updated A-Z Gore Scoreboard plus colour chunk-blowing pics, and throughout are profiles on Sam Raimi, H.G. Lewis, Sean Cunningham, Tobe Hooper et al., and also various other bits of enlightening fleshy shrapnel: Eco/Bio Hazzards, The Unwatchables, Animal Mutilation, Stuart Gordon, and Zines/Books. Import his sucker pronto!

PRIME EVIL
Edited by Douglas E. Winter
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Shit! It almost makes me weep when I imagine what this anthology could have been. Scan these names: Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, David (Rambo) Morrell, Peter Straub, Thomas Ligotti, Whitley (little green men) Streiber, Denis Etchison, Charles L. Grant and Thomas Tessier. Bringing up the rear there's Jack Cady, M. John Harrison and Paul Hazel, with Douglas E. Winter at the helm. So what went wrong?

Some of you may have noticed that some of those writers belong to the School of Quiet Horror (Grant, Campbell, Straub). Their presence must have resonated through the others as well! So instead of a blockbuster group of spine-rakers, it's more like a waltz of shadows; a bunch of stories written for an audience of writers, instead of readers. But there are a few exceptions...

Stephen King has the most entertaining story in 'The Night Flier'; a modern vampire tale whose villainous throat-biter uses a Cessna 337 to hop from meal to meal! It's fun and gory and vintage King.

Clive Barker takes the quiet road, but don't worry – 'Coming to Grief' is his most (only?) terrifying story to date. A young woman is trying to come to terms with the death of her mother, but a monster living on the wall of the local quarry makes her task a bit difficult. Weird and fluid in true Barker fashion (it's better than Cabal).

David Morrell has the most outstanding story: 'Orange is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity'. It's the most harrowing tale of impending horror I've read in a long time. A Van Goughesque painter called Van Dorn worked with a bizarre style that send all his 20th Century experts to self-mutilation. Superbly written and yes, the mutilations are stabbingly graphic.

As for the other stories, well, there's lots of issues, meanings, messages, and allegory being tossed about. Some of 'em have a few okay moments, but on the whole they're tedious and boring to read. If you think otherwise then tell me! I can only recommend this book for the above three stories and perhaps, to those curious enough to see what the other blokes have been up to lately.

BARE BONES: CONVERSATIONS ON TERROR WITH STEPHEN KING
Edited by T. Underwood and C. Miller
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Yet another King-related publication to read during your stay at the Overlook Hotel next year! This one is brought to you by the pair responsible for the excellent Kingdom of Fear, which was kind of a celebrity roast with King on the spit.

Bare Bones is a collection of all (or most, since he would have done a few since going to press) interviews recorded with the Master of Horror etc.

While the subjects invariably recurr many times over many interviews (25 in all), the landscape of King's mind is always a fascinating place to explore: his thoughts and opinions seem to have a smokey, hypotic effect on you, just like they did in Danse Macabre (you can still kill a half-hour train jaunt with any chunk of that book). Anyone wanting an update of it should find enough meat in Bare Bones, although the time span for the recordings (going by the copyrights) only ranges from 1979 to 1985.

It's easy to tell when the interviewer is actually familiar with King and his work and when he or she is just asking generic questions. The U.S.A. today host has the distinction of asking the dumbest question of all – "Do you get yourself into a scary mood before you start writing? (which was also his last question). King's reply – "No."

The best I think are the dual interviews with Peter Straub. Here's one exchange –

STRAUB: ...we definitely want to scare. But gross-outs? I'm not interested in that.

KING: Oh, I am.

STRAUB: You are?

KING: I like gross outs.

I'll leave your with another quote, then you can decide for yourself...

"...I mean it's a monster rally. Everybody is there. I thought it would be a good one to go out with. Called It. I should call it Shit."

BLUE WORLD
Robert R. McCammon
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Yee-haa! At last Robert McCammon has collected his short fiction into one book. I don't think the short story as a form of fiction is utilised in any genre as much as in horror. This fact ain't so surprising when you realise the short story was practically invented by Edgar Allan Poe!

Okay back to the book. I haven't read all that much McCammon, only Baal, Stinger and the fabuloso Usher's Passing in the novels dept., and this collection plus 'Eat Me' from The Book of the Dead. In all cases though he proved he could write just as slickly as anyone. In terms of readability his prose rules. Not too stuffy and rugged like Ramsey Campbell; not verbose and prissy like Clive Barker, or long winded and rambling like Stephen King (excluding those novels of course, you Kingphiles know them!). It's cut to the bone, yet incredibly visual and able to create energetic characters you're led to care for. My only reservation is he doesn't spray enough blood. I don't want him to go splatter punk fulltime, but a few gut-shredding limit-ripping stories wouldn't hurt.

Okay back to the book (promise!). Like I said, you won't find any tidal waves of gore in a McCammon tome, but if you can live with that then this book is well worth trying. It has eight previously published shorts and five newies. As with most anthologies there's good ones along side the bad ones.

The best here is 'Doom City', simply a masterpiece and is the reason why I read horror fiction, particularly short stories. 'Nightcrawlers' is the source for among the best Twilight Zone from the new series; heavily supernatural (like most of his stuff) but the addictive narrative hauls you through. In the eye-watering 'Pin' a psycho gets a very close look at the head of a needle. 'Something Passed By' has lots of weird fun shit. 'Yellow Jacket Summer' will give anyone with an allergy to insect stings itchy flesh. 'I Scream Man' is horrible in that Psychoesque revelation vein. 'Makeup' has a Blochian twist that sadly deflates the buildup. 'He'll Come Knocking at Your Door' and 'The Red House' are curiosities at best. The other stories hardly belong in a strictly horror anthology, but who said that's what this is anyway?

Lastly the title novella 'Blue World' is again not purely horror but is a marvelous read just the same. A young priest falls in love with a porno star, who happens to be on the psychopathic cowboy's death-list. Believe me it's much better than it sounds!!