I’ve always liked to push my entertainment capacity to its absolute limit. My husband doesn’t always get it (and has regretted watching a few of my movie picks) and he’s not alone. The category of people who enjoy consuming FUCKED up shit is definitely in the minority.
As I’ve gotten older however I’ve been able to engage with others in this weird online space and learned I’m not alone. There is a market out there for fucked up shit. My journey began with seeking out fucked up movies. I’ve always enjoyed horror so I thought hey, what could be better than turning the dial up to 11?
I’d work my way down a list of, “50 Most Disturbing Movies of All Time” and as you’d expect some were good, many were not. There’s a certain art to using fucked up shit for entertainment purposes. The films that felt like two hours of strictly gore porn always fell flat, but those with deep stories, complex characters, AND fucked up shit really soared.
Then recently I rediscovered my love of both reading and writing. I’ll save the story for another time, but basically there’s little time to achieve either when you’ve got young kiddos. I thought hey, why not take my love of fucked up shit and see what’s happening in the literary world? Enter – Extreme Horror: (See also – splatterpunk) a subgenre of horror fiction aimed at people like me. Perfect!
I was enticed by the gritty titles, the nasty cover art, the enthralling synopses. But so far I have to say, I’m not impressed. Don’t get me wrong these books are just as gross, disgusting, and bile-inducing as any disturbing film found on a top 50 list, but that seems to be the extent of their merit. I want the disturbing details, the sentences that were hard to write and equally hard to read, but at the end of the day I also want to read a good story.
Despite promising terror the most that some of these books deliver is a real gross-out fest with a lack of narrative arc. If the book is a stand-out and can achieve both the raw, fucked up shit that many of us desire as well as a great story with complex characters then it’s a hit, in my opinion.
I’m going to continue to explore this subgenre and post my reviews on Goodreads, but for now it seems like this subgenre only exists to give writers a place to put all of their gross thoughts with a trigger warning.
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