Bob @ Beauty in Ruins
PLEASE NOTE: I'm rarely active here anymore, but please feel free to follow me on Goodreads, where I post regularly.
These are the chronicles of a book addict, a photo junkie, and an aspiring author, rewriting the very fabric of reality one page (and one snapshot) at a time. From the strange to the unusual; the abandoned to the abnormal; the haunted to the historic; the supernatural to the surreal; the forests of dark fantasy, the cemeteries of gothic horror, and the post-apocalyptic ruins of science fiction are the landscapes of my imagination.
Currently reading
WTF Friday: Stuck On You by Jasper Bark
They're often an underground of sort of literature, best shared through guilty whispers, and often with embarrassed grins. These are our WTF Friday reads!
Justice may be blind, but she's also cruel - and, in so far as Stuck On Youis concerned, she has a razor sharp sense of irony.
All Ricardo had to do was drive across the border into Mexico, pick up some cheap little artesanias for his wife, and bring them back home for her hobby business. The side-trip to the cheap strip club might have been excusable, but agreeing to help Consuela smuggle her belly full of contraband back across the border certainly was not . . . and following her into forest for a little hanky panky even less so.
That's all backstory, though, andJasper Bark makes us wait for the explanation. Instead, he throws us right into the ironic carnage, with Ricardo waking up fused to the hideously charred corpse of his little piece of Mexican tail, having been struck by lightning at the moment of climax. Trapped, far from civilization, he has to drag their melted bodies through the forest in an agonizing attempt to reach his Jeep and the cellphone locked inside.
It's a tense story, full of sex and gore, that seems increasingly hopeless as Ricardo's dilemma drags on. The level of detail is just about perfect, with Bark's style echoing the efficient yet eloquent prose of masters like Laymon and Little. As deliciously cruel as it all is however, it's the series of final twists in the end that really make it work. Without giving anything away, if you thought being melted to a rotting corpse, with your manhood permanently locked inside her, was as bad as it could get . . . well, as Ricardo would no doubt tell you, assumptions can be dangerous things.
Kindle Edition, 42 pages
Published March 25th 2014 by Crystal Lake Publishing
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