My Books of Horror Go To List project has introduced me to a lot of extreme horror, that bastard offspring of splatterpunk and torture porn that proves so polarising to fans. And, for a genre that often finds itself dismissed for doing one thing—making the reader squirm uncomfortably—none of them seem to do the same thing. 'Woom' isn't 'The Slob' and neither of them is 'Man Cave', let alone 'Dead Inside', my favourite example, thus far. This frantic and brutal novel goes somewhere completely different again and I'm still unpacking everything that it does.

It starts with a double suicide. Nick and Jess are boyfriend and girlfriend and they've been hit by a crippling wave of misfortune. "Life wasn't supposed to be like this," Nick pleads to the god that he doesn't believe in. It started with the miscarriage, when they lost their unborn son, a horror that Jess hasn't found a way to address yet. Then Nick lost his dad to a drunk driver, then his job, then their home. Jess' sister gets a terminal cancer diagnosis at only twenty-four, which is just a cruel twist of fate. And they decide together that they can't go on. They've sunk to the bottom and now want nothing more than the blissful nothing they expect will be on the other end of an overdose.

The happy ending to chapter one is death. Except Nick then wakes up, which wasn't the plan. He's chained to a fat man with no jaw who's dragging him through mud. Then a giant slug tries to eat him but he returns the favour. And Danny takes him through orientation. He's not in Heaven and he's not in Hell, as much as his recent experience might feel like the latter. He's in the Black Farm, which is where suicides go after death. The only way out is to voluntarily be eaten alive by the Pig, who runs the place. He then recommends that you go up or down depending on how you taste.

There's a lot here already. The look at despair and depression in the first chapter is touching, not remotely what I expect to feel from an extreme horror novel, especially at the start when they're usually trying to punch me in the gut. The horror that follows isn't what I expect either, because it feels like the product of worldbuilding; a concept I never expected to see in extreme horror. It's a fantasy novel as much as a horror novel, but one more brutal than anything grimdark I've read so far. The template is clearly Hell, somewhere that extreme horror ought to have season tickets for, but I haven't seen it go there until now. Of course, this isn't Hell, it's a sort of niche Purgatory. At least, that's what orientation tells us.

Our first realisation is that we have a lot of questions and the first question is what can we trust? If there's anywhere you can expect to be lied to, it's Hell, and the only people telling Nick that he is stuck in the Black Farm, which isn't Hell, are the people already there, who would be inherently untrustworthy if it is Hell. It's quite the paradox but Nick can't stop to untangle logistical nuance. He clearly has three tasks at hand, all of which are gloriously ironic for someone who's just killed himself. The first is to survive. The second is to find Jess. The third is to get them both out.

And here we find ourselves asking a different question. Is any of this real? Does Nick really die? Is he really in the Black Farm which serves a particular purpose in between Heaven and Hell? Or has his body started to fight the pills and his brain is telling him that he doesn't really want to die at all? Is this entire novel the unconscious struggle of a dying man to cling to life after all? What will Nick do to go back to the life that he'd literally given up on?

From that perspective, there's some serious character growth here. He's no great hero. While he and Jess were both given more than anyone should have to deal with, let alone all at once, they'd given up long before they got to the pills. As hard as it might seem, there are times to fight, and they made all the wrong decisions. Is he willing to face himself and start to make the right ones? After all, what he goes through in this book is a thousand times worse than facing another day as an employed man without a father or a son. He still had Jess and Jess still had him. They may both be selfish, but they honestly seem to love each other. That's something to build on.

However we read this, Nick is effectively stuck in the Black Farm and Elias Witherow has a whole barrage of atrocities to rain down upon him. While avoiding the monstrous Pig Born, people born in the Black Farm, he finds another relatively grounded human, Megan by name, and Muck gets them both, the fate they were both warned against. Witherow obviously sets this scene for Muck to rape Megan, but he pulls the rug out from under us. He rapes Nick instead, and cuts his eyelids off so he has to watch him rape Megan. Then Muck cuts off his arms, binds him in barbed wire and replaces his teeth with screws so he can better eat her flesh. Like I said, this is extreme horror.

However, we never lose that worldbuilding. Muck has a lot do with the Needle Fields. The Keepers guard the waters that surround the island on which the Black Farm is situated.  Somewhere up in the mountains are the lights of the Eyes of the World, where representatives of Heaven and Hell watch the Pig's administration to ensure that he's doing the job he was given and not thinking of moving beyond. There are the Hooves of the Pig, a cult who worship the Pig and naturally do so in an outrageously awful way.

And we never lose the irony. Nick, and presumably Jess, are here because they killed themselves, which is a special sort of sin. However, the only way to leave the big picture, the Black Farm itself, is to voluntarily feed yourself to the Pig, which isn't far from a fresh suicide, and the only way to escape any of the little pictures, like being trapped inside one of Muck's cages, is to kill yourself, absolutely a fresh suicide. This is suddenly an extreme horror version of 'Edge of Tomorrow'.

Of all the many things Witherow gives us that I didn't expect to find in an extreme horror novel, is the need to figure out the rules under which the Black Farm works before the author lets me in on them, in order to identify a way in which Nick can find Jess and then the two of them can escape. I don't expect to care about the protagonists of an extreme horror novel and I don't expect to find myself emotionally invested. That's quite the realisation, especially when both these characters are deeply flawed and have to resort to horrific acts to survive and, eventually, to escape.

I won't spoil them, but Nick does a heck of a lot of things in this book that would normally render him a villain, if not an outright monster, one of which seems particularly unforgivable in isolation, but by that point he's an action hero in this survival horror story. We're still somehow behind him. However, there is the potential that this is all metaphorical, that he's not really doing what we're reading him doing; this is just his mind playing tricks on him to test his will to survive. If so, all the flaws associated with both these acts and his attitudes are excusable because everything's taking place in his head, which is inherently flavoured by his flaws.

I should also add that this is an incessant read. 'The Black Farm' nudges past three hundred pages of trade paperback and everything is presented traditionally, with regular-sized and spaced text and regular margins. Some of these extreme horror novels manipulate that to make it seem like they're far more substantial than they are (hello, 'Man Cave'). This doesn't. Yet I devoured this in a single sitting. Sure, I had to refill the bath a couple of times because the water got cold, but the book wasn't started when I got in and it was finished when I got out. Three hundred pages in two and a half hours is quick reading. That's thirty seconds a page, much faster than I usually go. This story drove the speed.

I'm now eager to pick up the direct sequel, simply titled 'Return to the Black Farm'. On the face of it, there's no need for it to exist. This tells a complete story with no need for anything more, most especially if we take it from the perspective that it's all internal to Nick's struggle to live after all. If there was a true sequel, it would seem to be a romance, with Nick and Jess freshly committed to live and to each other. They'd try for a child again, maybe by adoption, and live happy lives free of the horrors of the Black Farm. Of course, that's not what Witherow gives us and I'm willing to find out why he thinks there's a need for a horror novel to follow. Then again, maybe the answer lies in four simple letters: PTSD. He deserves that. ~~ Hal C F Astell