One subgenre that's highly popular right now both in terms of book sales and discussion at the Books of Horror group on Facebook is extreme horror, which is something I've been waiting eagerly to delve into. Beyond just wanting to see what it does, which ought to be self-explanatory, I want to see how different it is to what's gone before. I grew up in the UK in the eighties, so I'm used to what a lot of people saw as extreme horror at the time, whether to praise it as the next level the genre would reach or denigrate it in a litany of outrage. How would the legendary books of extreme horror today match up against those I know, like the nasty novels published by Hamlyn.

My first attempt to dive into extreme horror was Duncan Ralston's Woom, back in April, which claims on its front cover that it's an extreme horror novel, but I didn't read it that way. Both lead characters did a series of extreme things, but the overwhelming emotion I felt was sympathy. It was a very human story, crafted well and containing only what needed to be said to tell that story. For all its taboo content, it did not seem to be as gratuitous as many novels I read back in the eighties.

This, on the other hand, is, and Aron Beauregard is clearly aiming for that. The overwhelming emotion here is disgust and we can feel the author revelling in our response, because that's what his measure of success. Did we squirm at this part? Did we cringe at that one? Did we throw the book down like it was a disease vector and shout something like, "Holy shit, he went there!" Well, I didn't do the latter, though I certainly thought that line often, but I certainly did the other two, because he does his job well and in a way that fits what I thought extreme horror might be.

For one, it's utterly gratuitous. While we're given plenty of background to flesh out the lead character, who I should add is not the Slob of the title, it's all there to get us to a point, from which it's balls to the wall on out. Sure, this is arguably a novella, at under a hundred and thirty pages, but Beauregard does well to maintain the tone without it all become just noise.

For two, it's all about the what never the who. The only character we truly learn much about is the lead, Vera Harlow, with her husband Daniel in a distant second place because he's only there to help deepen Vera's character. Yes, we meet the titular Slob and we watch him do a whole lot of utterly disgusting and outrageous things, but that's all he is, the vector by which the gratuitous stuff happens. We never learn his name or his background. He has less character than any random piece of art hanging on my wall. It's just not what he's there for and, quite frankly, if he'd been given character, we might start to see him as human and that wouldn't have helped this book. He's kind of like the truck in 'Duel'. We have nothing to go on except what he does and that's entirely the point. He is what he does.

And for three, it's roughly written. I won't say badly written, because it isn't. Beauregard knows exactly what he's doing, as the above paragraph suggests. There are a host of ways this could have gone wrong but he avoids all those traps, staying on point throughout. He keeps it simple, focused on one woman, a few others fed in as needed, almost as props. He avoids humanising his villain, so the Slob remains like an urban legend to freak out your friends with. He maintains  a consistent tone, the story remembered by Vera who is far from a literary genius so tells her tale in simple, generally short sentences. This is my first Aron Beauregard so I don't know if he deliberately played up the use of commas or new sentences instead of semi-colons, but it feels right for the story, even if it's often frustrating to a grammar purist.

Vera is a neat freak for very good reasons indeed, namely an upbringing in a household that could have had a lot more care and attention lavished upon it before she took up that task herself at a tender age. Discovering a cockroach in her lunchbox at school was a traumatising event but only the first of many. A self-harming sister who finally finds dedication enough to shoot herself in the head in her bedroom has to be the most traumatising, especially as Vera had to clean up the mess, right down to the eyeball that had wedges itself into a cracked heating vent. So yeah, we can buy into neat freak.

The real story arguably begins years later, when Vera's grown up, married to a disabled veteran—Daniel was paralysed from the waist down by shrapnel at the very end of the Vietnam war—and pregnant with his child. A salesman knocks on her door to hawk the Bissell SC 1632 vacuum cleaner, which I was stunned to discover is actually real, this extreme horror novella turning out to be a highly effective advert for it, one they may not actually appreciate too much. The bottom line is that it works and it works really well, enough that Vera decides to take up door to door sales herself, unyielding in her faith of the product, as a means to earn some extra money for when the baby comes.

It goes well, because the product practically sells itself and the unusual sight of a saleswoman in an age of misogyny in the business helps too. However, we all know full well that this new moneymaking effort is going to eventually bring her to the door of the Slob and we can only imagine what's going to happen then. I won't spoil what happens at that point but I will say that it's exactly what "extreme horror" will conjure up in your darker imaginations. Are you twisted enough to imagine a worse time for Vera than Beauregard? You would need to be a sick puppy indeed to do so.

Horror works well as catharsis. We read or watch outrageously horrific things happening to others and we leave secure in the belief that, whatever might happen to us during the rest of that day, it won't be remotely as bad. We're happy that it happened to someone else, especially someone who doesn't exist because an author or a filmmaker made them up. Everyone's safe, including us, and we can go on with our life, our worries lessened by the perspective we've just been given. I felt a lot of catharsis here, as what Vera goes through is just like that but worse. I may not buy into how strong she remains given the devastating torments visited upon her but I appreciated it nonetheless because, if she can do it, then I could do it, right? Not that I'm going to be demonstrating a Bissell to the Slob, but still.

The only thing that bugged me here is that the entire story is told from Vera's perspective except for a single chapter. She's our protagonist. She's our final girl. She's the canvas upon which this novella was painted. Naturally, the story has to be told from her perspective. However, there's a single background thread to hint at a bigger picture and that's primarily explored in a chapter that feels out of place. It's not inappropriate to tell us, because it's good background and it provides another taboo to be broken, but there's no effort given to explain how we can hear it. It's almost like we discovered a videotape in a weird way, popped it into a VCR and watched a found footage horror movie shot on a single camera, but with a completely different scene mysteriously spliced in for our benefit. Now, I can't offer any solution but I have to acknowledge the problem.

But hey, that's a minor detail given the depths of depravity to which Beauregard manages to stoop and that's the point of this book. It absolutely disgusts and it offers a powerful challenge to the reader in a similar way to how William Castle used to promote his horror movies. Can you survive a visit to the Slob? Do you have what it takes to make it through 130 pages of pure terror? Remember, there's no shame in walking out partway through if you don't have the guts. ~~ Hal C F Astell