Damn, that's a first line!

There's a real art to crafting a memorable first line, which is the first part of a book that a reader encounters that was undoubtedly written by the author. The front cover should grab you, the back cover blurb should entice you and, if they do, then the potential reader is going to turn to the first page and, at that point, it's up to the author to hook them. Orwell did it: "It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen." Bradbury did it: "It was a pleasure to burn." Gibson did it: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." Now, Volpe does it too: "The strap-on dildo was nearly the size of a fire extinguisher."

After that, you're either absolutely hooked or you've closed the book and walked away. You know exactly where you stand.

This is a Books of Horror Go-To List review and Daniel Volpe has two books on that list. I've heard a lot about the other one, 'Left to You', which takes the daring step of tying a contemporary horror novel to the Holocaust, but knew little about 'Talia'. It turns out that she's a wannabe actress who, like so many who head to Hollywood, or, in this instance, Broadway, finds that she's a small fish in a very big pond and struggles to make ends meet with a small part in a small show. You won't be too surprised to find that there's a man in the shadows who has the money she needs if she's willing. In this book that's Mike Maione and we meet her six months into her underground porn career.

My first impressions, other than that outstanding first line, are that this is clearly a self-published book. There's no publisher listed, there's a recognisable CreateSpace/KDP print stamp at the back and the font size and first line indents are large. However, it's well-proofed and capably laid out, a detail that's rare in this world. It was also edited, by Lee Andrew Forman of Tattered Edges Press, and that's even more rare. It's always good to see a self-published book so professionally done.

The template is rape revenge, but it's not quite that simple. For a start, Talia's eyes were open as she got into this business and Mike pays well and promptly. She's made it in show business, even if kinky porn shoots for underground VHS release hardly counts as mainstream. That first one is less kinky than expected and Talia doesn't even wear that fire extinguisher sized strap-on. That's her co-star, Simone. She just pees on the guy in the gimp mask who receives it all. She even gets to be something of an actress because Simone certainly isn't and Mike doesn't explain the scenes until right before they begin.

The second shoot is routine during its first act, but gets seriously masochistic in the second, with a barbed wire whip. It's not a snuff film, even if Mike has his right hand man, Salvatore Testa—Sally—kill and dispose of him afterwards, but, needless to say, that's where we're going. These weren't ever nice people, even if they pay on time, and the escalation shouldn't surprise much. Nor should the fact that Simone wants out after that one but Mike has the dressing room bugged and so she's the unwilling star of the snuff film that they shoot next.

If you can't see where we're going from there, then you aren't paying attention. As happy as Talia is to keep making these kinky films to pay her bills, it's not going to stay that simple. This business thrives on taking it another step towards the extreme and the only surprise should be that it ends up being with a lesbian former KGB torturer called Ingrid. My favourite moment in the book, after that opening line, is the moment when she calls home to talk with her husband. They have kids and live an outwardly entirely normal life. I got the impression that he doesn't know who she was and what she still gets up to on her so-called business trips.

If the rape in this rape revenge story doesn't fit its usual definition but a gradual shift from what Talia's willing to do for money to what she won't, then the revenge doesn't quite take the typical form either. Well, it kind of does. She does exactly what you think and it's karma well delivered. It just comes with a bit of a twist and I'm not going to spoil that. I'll just say that it arrives two-thirds of the way into the novel and counts as even more of a left turn than I expected. While I expected a shift from rape to revenge, as it were, I didn't see this coming in the slightest.

I've been finding the extreme horror novels that made the Go-To List fascinating. Some have been what their critics would cite as everything wrong with the genre, but others really do bring a hard new element to it. This is probably the closest I've read thus far that fits both extreme horror and splatterpunk, because those are two different subgenres that are often mistaken for each other. Extreme horror exists to ick you out by going further than you're comfortable going. Splatterpunk was a conscious effort to bring the violent nature of certain seventies movies to horror literature. Probably for the first time in this project, this really counts as both. ~~ Hal C F Astell