Hoo boy. This one's a doozy.

The Big Book of Blasphemy is exactly what it says on the tin: it's big, it's a book and oh my is it blasphemous. Editors Regina Garza Mitchell and David G. Barnett have collected 30 horror stories (technically 29 and a poem) of sin and religious affrontery that are enough to make any devout worshipper turn white with queasiness and purple with rage. "If you're religious, look no further – this book is not for you," the blurb declares, and reader they are not overselling it.

The tales collected herein run the gamut from thoughtful explorations of religious hypocrisy and zealotry to nasty stories of rape and torture and general depravity. There's little here that would cause a believer to reject their faith, but there's plenty that would upset and sicken them. Atrocities are condoned by the faithful and damned alike, as people are murdered and chopped up and raped and eaten all in the name of Jesus or Satan or whatever deity happens to be around at the time. The best word to describe some of these stories is dirty. Like there's a sheen of oil or grease on them that won't rub off, a layer of seediness that never fully goes away. There's precious little salvation to be found here, just a world of evil and temptation and a cold cold universe.

As with most anthologies, especially ones of this size, the stories are hit and miss. Blasphemy is lucky in that the vast majority of the stories are hits, with only one or two proving too purple-prosey, confusing or comparatively dull when set alongside the others. Below are the standouts, the most noteable for better and for worse.

'Goddess of the Gallows' by Kristofer Triana – a man with a fixation on hanging himself discovers a cult dedicated to the Ixtab, the Mayan goddess of suicide by hanging. This is the book's first prose story and first orgy (yes, this book has multiple orgies), and it starts with some pretty extreme acts of desecration. Holy books are used as toilet paper, people dressed as religious figures perform acts of sex and violence on each other. This story's placement is no coincidence; clearly the editors are letting us know that imagery like this is how they mean to go on. Turn back and repent now, sinners. Triana's writing is great and extremely visual, perhaps too visual at times!

'Scriptures' by Edward Lee – a zealous priest and his sons rape and torture the women of the family while quoting religious scripture. No doubt meant as a criticism of the Church's history of misogyny and treatment of women, it comes across more as an excuse to write about the kinky degradation of women, and the underage incest is just not for me. It's certainly not badly written, though, it's just that the subject matter was a bridge too far for me.

'Jesus or Jacob?' by Ali Seay – this is my favourite of the bunch. A devout father, led astray by a bigot in his church, tries to reconcile the loving teachings of Jesus with the more smite-y aspects of Christian teachings, as he and a group of compatriots prepare to storm an LGBT+ church meeting. Seay really places us in the father's head as he agonises over making the right decision, a dilemma he sees as a choice between two Gods. Beautifully written and quite tragic.

'Angelbait' by Ryan Harding – now this one is my kind of nasty. Three seemingly random people find themselves captured by a hunter who believes he can use them to summon an angel if he punishes them in the manner various saints were punished. This involves inflicting various terrible bodily harms on them – and forcing them to drink the pus and other fluids of a leper that's confined in them. The way Harding describes these sessions turned my stomach, and I'm not especially squeamish when it comes to fiction. This was just so disgusting and horrific that it pushed my buttons. Very nicely done!

'R.I.B. Rest in Blood' by Paolo Di Prazio – this one was not my kind of nasty. A Pastor, who seems to be possessed by a holy force, kills his wife and kidnaps his trans daughter to punish them, believing that he can cast the woman out of his 'son' through torture. Again, this is doubtless a commentary on the Church's traditional stance on such things, but the constant transphobia throughout made me extremely uncomfortable and didn't make for an easy read. Approach at your peril, reader.

'The Cursing Prayer' by Lucy Taylor – mankind is struggling to get by after an environmental apocalypse, and a religious totalitarian regime has a strict stranglehold on the population. Children are the future, but they're starting to spout horribly graphic blasphemous prayers that threaten to bring their teacher to the attention of the fascist Providers. Worse, they claim that the man who taught them these prayers is Jesus himself. An excellently bleak look at a future in which Jesus, sick of our shit, is back with a new message.

Those are, for my money, the best of the bunch and the ones that stuck in my mind the most. Even the ones that were definitely not for me have lodged themselves into my psyche and sunk their hooks in tight. Among the other stories we have angel-eaters, angel-fuckers, false prophets, pizza cults, prosperity gospel snake oil salesmen, religious parents committing and fostering atrocities, a Jesus who's just a right dick, cannibalistic half-angels and proof that God doesn't exist & if he does then he hates us and it serves us right.  And more filthy, kinky sex than you can shake a semen-covered stick at.

It's outrageous, funny, disgusting and, yes, thought-provoking. The pages fly by and I found myself unable to put this down, mostly out of morbid curiosity about what depravity might be coming next. The many depictions of rape are grating (two male rapes are even played for laughs) as media currently has a real obsession with it as a means to shock an audience, but I suppose that as a profane act it does make sense that it appears in a book of blasphemous stories. It's just disheartening to see authors still relying on it.

If you have a cast iron stomach and a good deal of cynicism towards organised religion then dive right in. You might not like all of what you see, but you'll definitely find something that'll scratch that sacrilegious itch. But if you're squeamish or have an ounce of faith in humanity and the existence of a divine being that loves and cares for us?  Er, maybe leave this one on the shelf.

​Sam Kurd 

Aside from the isolated story here and there, I was a novice to the work of Patrick Freivald.  I had met him years ago, consider him a friend and we even shared a reading slot at a convention once (his story was devastating!) where was I going here....oh!  His recent collection is a sampler in the truest sense of that word, nearly every story dips its taloned toes into another part of the genre pool. We have hard-assed science fiction and ooey gooey horror, we have reflective quiet weird and loudly wounding dark. Grab that flashlight and I'll give you a look around.

The collection opens with the title story, a dim and drab futuristic parable about survival and the sacrifices necessary to do so, it also has scary mechanical creatures in it. "Forward Base Fourteen" is an oddly pliable grimy, gritty, sci-fi nightmare. "The Star" is a rock & roll story, we've heard it before but never with so much sweet distortion!

Patrick Loveland is not here to dispense universal truths. He's not here to wax philosophical on the nature of humanity, our place in the cosmos and our responsibilities as a species. He's not here to ponder the meaning of life.

Patrick Loveland is here to let things get Weird and to let the gore hit the fan.

Too Many Eyes is an anthology of sixteen cosmic horror stories that focus on frantic action, snarky heroes and buckets of blood, organs and gooey flesh speckled with eyes. They're arranged chronologically by setting, ranging from the mountains of Wild West era California to a mysterious scientific outpost in the 23rd Century. This gives Loveland the chance to dip his toes (or other, less recognisable appendages) into war fiction, military scifi and cyberpunk. The stories are two-fisted, pulpy tales that are action-focused but don't skimp on the cosmic dread and body-horror.

The collection starts strong with 'Ekwiiyemak (The Place Where it Rains)', as our first hero, a reformed and retired gunslinger, is drawn into a dangerous hunt by old friend Shiv, a dangerous woman who doesn't seemed to have aged a day in twenty years. Though perhaps a little too over-concerned with describing the characters' weaponry (a running issue throughout the stories), it's an excellent old-fashioned tale of formerly-human monsters and the ingenuity and perseverance needed to take them down. I've recently finished Red Dead Redemption 2, so that helped me get in the mood!

'Pizzapokalyps' may not be the strongest tale of the bunch, but its tale of an 80's metal-themed pizza place whose merchandise goes on rampage is extremely silly fun. 'Ley Lines' and 'Whoever Fights Monsters' are two of the most interesting present-day stories, following Special Agent Blakely Tan as she fights monsters that may or may not be real; it has a very True Detective vibe about it.

The book's centrepiece is its longest story, the titular 'Too Many Eyes'. Set at first in a San Diego cinema, a mysterious film is screened that results in chaos as the cinema is converted into a death trap, with pulsing organic flesh and grasping many-eyed tentacles everywhere. The watching-a-film-where-a-character-watches-a-film mechanic is interesting, but tricky to pull off in prose, but Loveland really hits his stride when the characters are beset by the horrors of the once-familiar building. The story then hits a strange tonal shift with the introduction of a group of heavily-armoured mercenary types, almost as if Alien turned into Aliens halfway through. It remains entertaining until the end, though, despite the change in tone. It's so visually driven, with its nightmarish transformations and ghoulish deaths, that it almost demands to be a movie itself. Just don't say you weren't warned when you screen it...

The power-armoured soldiers trope is present in full force in the last third of the book as the stories see a lot of elditch abominations taken on with bullets and missiles, with varying degrees of success. The most interesting of the future stories is the cyberpunk-tinged 'PIE', which sees a Yakuza enforcer in Hong Kong (there's a good reason she's there, it's not weird) hunted by man-made cybernetic abominations. There's a strong anime influence here, and the lead character is tough and resourceful in her fight against the slavering monsters sent after her – and yet you can't help but feel sorry for the creatures somehow, as they can't help what they've become.

That anime influence is peppered throughout the fights in the book, with big swords and exo-skeletons and remote-controlled mechs popping up everywhere. Loveland clearly loves the genre, as everything from Demons to Return of the Living Dead to Event Horizon is evoked in his stories. The gore is liberally applied throughout the early stories, with people being digested in alien sacs and limbs and offal flying everywhere. Loveland's writing shines the most here, as I'm not squeamish but even I winced once or twice at the thought of what was happening to these poor people.

A couple of the stories don't hit home as well the rest, but there's plenty to satisfy even the most demanding gorehound. The occasional recurring character and technologies is a fun technique that keeps you interested, wondering if they'll pop up in the next story. I do feel that more could have been made of this, as I wondered if they were building up to a larger story at the end that would have several protagonists meet and work together on a special mission, but it was sadly not not to be.

If you like your horror fast-paced, riddled with bullets and full of pulsing translucent flesh and things that should not be, then this collection is for you. It won't keep you up at night jumping at shadows or pondering the sheer pointlessness of humankind's existence on a cosmic scale, but it will serve up some deliciously twisted imagery and a bloody good time.

Review by Sam Kurd ​

Many thanks to Erin Sweet Al-Mahairi and Raw Dog Screaming Press for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review.
 
I have mixed feelings about this collection.  On the positive side, I found James Chambers to be an excellent writer.  His characters have depth and are believable.  For the most part, the stories are excellently paced for being short stories.  And he writes with a pleasing narrative tone - no complaints from me about how the writing sounds in my head as I read it.  Often while reading the book, I was able to take a step back and think, .  I can see why he’s won awards and nominations (in fact, I just learned this collection is on the 2019 Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot).
 
But there were just a fair amount of stories in this collection that just didn’t resonate with me at all.  And to be fair, it is not a reflection of James’ writing ability - he is a talented writer.  It’s just that many of them had themes or characters that I wasn’t familiar with, so it was hard for me to get into them.  I’d never heard of characters like Carl Kolchak from a few movies and a TV series, or Anton Zarnak, a character created by author Lin Carter.  I’m not saying that fellow readers won’t enjoy these stories if they’d never heard of these characters.  I just felt like I would have enjoyed them better understanding some of the context behind the stories.  Otherwise, they were just stories in which I couldn’t find a meaning.

Author’s site:  www.jameschambersonline.com
​

Christopher Slatsky has been a darling of mine since I first read his debut collection, Alectryomancer & Other Weird Tales, a few years ago. The timbre of his weird is a resonating one, and one I was eager to reacquaint myself with when The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature, his newest collection, found its way to my door.

From the very first story it is apparent that Slatsky has upped his game, stacked the deck with seamless melancholy and palpable regret. "Phantom Airfields" follows a devastated father as he searches for his missing son through desolate and possibly haunted locales.  "Engines of the Ocean" takes the concept of grief and longing and adds a gruesomely unsettling layer of salt.  "The Carcass of the Lion" is one of my very favorites of the collection, life long friends cling to one another as the shadow of death looms over one and the other finds her grip on the real and the remembered tenuously frail. This story just bulges with imagery and symbolism. It is astoundingly wonderful.

Review by Lesley Ann Campbell
 
John F. Leonard never fails to impress with his stories. His latest venture ‘Night Service’ is no exception. Reeled in from chapter one, I didn’t want to put this down.

What grabbed me first was the gritty realness of being out late at night, trying to get home and being wary of everyone – even the most innocent looking person can make you nervous after midnight. It’s as if reality alters, your vision shifts, and you can now see all the evil that exists alongside us.

Night Service starts out as any late journey would do, with trepidation and wariness of strangers. You just want to get home, get warm and get cosied up in bed. Luke just wanted to go home with the girl of his dreams, Jessica, and get comfy. Living pay check to pay check, like most of us, he can’t really afford a taxi or an Uber. He instead resorts to the night bus, a service he isn’t thrilled about but trying to thrifty he goes for.

The bus stop fills up with an eclectic mix of characters including a drunken thug, a chatty old man and a nervous mother and child. Relieve when the bus finally arrives quickly turns to terror as the passengers are thrown into their own personal nightmare.