Apeshit

Six teenagers go off to a cabin in the woods for the weekend. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

"The most fucked up book you'll ever" etc says the blurb, and most readers seem only too happy to repeat it. I wish I could. I wish the story and the gore and Mellick's admittedly enviable imagination when it comes to coming up with new ways to squick the reader out could overcome the fact that this is less a novel than it is a screenplay quickly rewritten in prose form. But...

OK, I get academic when I talk about horror. Sorry. I've seen just about every variation on this plot. Inbred hillbillies? Rape trees? Hockey masks? Nazi zombies? Flesh-eating viruses? Secret organisations with hidden cameras? The old plot has seen a lot of variations, and Apeshit doesn't even try to do anything new - it just piles on supposedly outrageous ideas. And yes, they are, and for a little while it's very entertaining. I mean, you have to admire a story in which a guy finds himself fucking the actual brain of the headshot victim forcing herself on him. But either I'm so jaded that even abortion porn doesn't faze me, or violence stops becoming disturbing when there's so much of it and none of it has any actual consequences, which it doesn't when the characters clearly only exist to be victims or suppliers of it, and you know that whatever happens, the writer is going to try to do something even worse on the next page. A couple of these ideas, milked for all they're worth, could have made it fucked up. As it is, it just gets boring; like listening to someone rattle off punchlines to jokes without telling a single one of them.