Ensuring Your Place in Hell (Splatploitation Horror Literature)
I’m going to be honest, this kind of pushed some boundaries for me, and that says a lot. I’m phased by very little, nothing much bothers me in terms of heavy description or squeamishness or violence. My avid reading of extreme horror of all kinds has completely desensitized me to the majority of things. But this trio of stories in Ensuring Your Place in Hell has taken the piss (in a positive sense) in terms of how much depravity and grossness can fit into a book of a mere seventy-nine pages. I can imagine if a trigger warning section needed to be added, that in itself would be a page long! The toughest read for me out of the three was the first one “Home Movies From Hell.” The story right from the get-go makes one feel on edge, as it begins with violent animal torture. Luckily, I managed to skim-read this and it doesn’t affect the story. As it continues, this brutality follows through the plot, as well as horrific and excruciatingly vile detail, and does so in the most unapologetic manner.
“The place was a regular torture playground as well, with walls upon walls of weapons to use on the disposable life. Clients could cut them, hack them, eat their fucking eyeballs or ball balls, puncture their organs, dice their tits, slit their dicks any way you please, cram nails up their assholes, whatever! Pay the high price, they were yours to do as you pleased. Let your depraved sadistic fucked-up mind run wild. If you could think it, you could do it! And if you fucked them up too much and killed them to the point in which they couldn’t even be presented as a reasonable already dead meal, they’d just end up in a stew with any other worthless parts kicking around.”
It has to be said though, that Stephen Cooper’s terrible tale “The Golden Cumpuss” took the word gruesome, multiplied it by about a million and then doubled it. This was the story that blew my mind and made me wonder how extreme horror writers sleep at night. The basic plot is extremely unique, and the ending is greatly surprising, but the overall unrelenting description of bodily fluids and waste on every page left me speechless. I was sickened. It’s the most “what the fuck?” thing I’ve ever read, and yet beneath all of the vileness the story is still there. For the first time, I found a book that nearly bested me, and this is a partial reason I read extreme horror. Pushing boundaries and finding books that might just be the ones I can’t read. Congratulations authors, you nearly made me want to DNF!!
Splatploitation Press Official Facebook
Written by Arianne, Sovereign Deity of the Damned
Ensuring Your Place in Hell (2023)
Otis Bateman, Stuart Bray, Stephen Cooper
Splatploitation Press
Cover Art: Truborn Designs (Kristina Osborn)
5 / 5
