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No One Rides for Free
by Judith Sonnet
Independently Published, $8.99, 136pp
Published: September 2022

I guess I've been waiting for a certain book without knowing which it would be and it turns out to be this one. I'm reading this 2022 novella by Judith Sonnet as part of a runthrough of the various books that get mentioned all the time in the 'Books of Horror' Facebook group, a real hotbed for indie horror and an absolute gem of a community. Sonnet is a regular contributor there and she's a valued member of that community.

You see, one of the subgenres that gets frequent mention in that group is "extreme horror", even though nobody seems to be able to firmly define it, and, being an old school fan of horror from the eighties, I've been fascinated by what it does and how it does it. Some of the books I've covered in previous months have been labelled extreme horror, though not all by far, and I've found them to very different. Duncan Ralston's 'Woom' counts, which I found to be a highly original vision. 'Cows' by Matthew Stokoe counts too, which is as utterly disgusting as it was hawked but in a fascinating way. And Aron Beauregard's 'The Slob' counts too, which is the closest of the three to this one, but I liked that a lot more.

'The Slob' was clearly gratuitous, meant to push boundaries as a reason for being rather than as a plot device, and 'No One Rides for Free' does that even more overtly and without anywhere near as much depth. That book had characters who had reasons to act in certain ways. It had a plot too, one that admittedly existed to allow those characters to do outrageously despicable things, but it had a plot. This one has a very skimpy framework indeed for the outrageously despicable to hang onto. The entire point of the book is to do disgusting things.

Now, Sonnet delivers on that front absolutely, perhaps the primary reason why this has garnered so many fans. There are a lot of one star reviews at Goodreads but there are five star reviews too and those readers didn't just hurl out five stars for fun. They loved this, because it absolutely went there and did that, ironically the same reason that others hated it. It's unashamed about what it does and it's utterly straightforward. In her afterword, Sonnet points out that she wrote this as a personal challenge, to write, edit and publish it in only ten days, which is not long at all. Those fans may well also appreciate just how raw this is because of that challenge.

This is my first Judith Sonnet, so I can't speak to any of her other many published stories, but there are two things I can note from the outside.

One is that this is the one people talk about the most. Whether it's good or bad or indifferent, it got a response. People read it and they rush to tell the world about it afterwards. That's powerful mojo for any author. The other is that it holds a much lower average rating than her typical books. I'm guessing that that's partly because this is an anomaly in her output and that while she usually writes extreme horror, it's less raw and uncompromising, maybe more nuanced and sophisticated. Of course, it's probably also partly because this is the one people start with and so, if they hate it, they won't try anything else and thus, this is the only one that gets the one star reviews.

Of course, I'm an anomaly, because I honestly can't say that I got much out of the novella but I did rather enjoy the short story that pads out the print edition, 'Cream Queen', so I'm intrigued as to what the typical Sonnet story might look like.

And, with all that said, I should tell you what 'No One Rides for Free' is all about. Well, it's Sonnet looking at the visceral exploitation movies of the seventies, horror of course but also especially a genre called rape revenge. The book itself is dedicated to David Hess, an actor who appeared in a bunch of those films and was well regarded for them, most obviously the original version of 'The Last House on the Left', but also 'The House on the Edge of the Park', a loose remake of the other, and both made it onto the BBFC's notorious list of video nasties. Also, the marketing mantra for the original, "To avoid fainting, keep repeating, 'It's only a movie.'" is directly adapted here for a literary form. It's only a book. It's only a book.

Those films involve characters doing unspeakable things to others and this does likewise, quickly and ruthlessly. Ostensibly, the lead character is Jodi Quinn and she's a middle-aged woman with a couple of kids, Ralph and Poppy, who are both in college. The novella opens with her driving them through the Texan desert back to college in New Mexico, but she stops at a gas station, both to fill up the tank and pick up snacks for the road. When she gets back in and sets back off, there's a new character sitting in the back seat, pointing a gun at her kids. He's simply The Man, because he has no name that he's willing to give and it doesn't matter because it might humanise him. He's pure sadistic evil and he's in control. He's the real lead character, even if we know little about him. He could easily have been played by David Hess.

My problem isn't that that paragraph, every moment of which unfolds within chapter one, is also the entire plot of the book. The Man can do anything he wants and, well, he does. After all, I could have written a synopsis of Steven Spielberg's 'Duel', one of the greatest TV movies ever made, in maybe a single sentence. "A driver is followed by a mysterious killer truck that's the embodiment of evil." Yeah, that just about covers it. This bad guy is just as mysterious as that killer truck. He's just in the back seat.

My problem is that there's nothing else here. Sonnet attempts to give Jodi Quinn some character but it never takes. She layers the Man's depraved actions capably, giving readers a succession of opportunities to repeat "It's only a book" and decided if they're able to continue. I can imagine a progression of readers giving up at every step. Maybe everyone gets past The Man busting open Ralph's nose with the butt of his gun. Maybe they get past him reminiscing about anally raping a girl after losing his virginity to her, because it's just a memory. Maybe they get past him asking a series of inappropriate questions to children riding in a car with their mum. I imagined Sonnet's voice teasing, "See, it's not so bad. Just keep going..."

Of course, it gets a lot worse, but that's all it does. We don't care about any of the characters. We don't feel suspense at what might to be come, because we know that everything's to come and it's not going to magically stop because we want it to. We don't really feel anything, except maybe an element of voyeurism because we keep watching what The Man does, as if it makes us complicit in his actions somehow. However, I didn't feel curiosity at what he might do next. I didn't feel, really, and that's a problem. I should feel something because the writer should wring that out of me, but that just never happened here.

I guess I did feel one thing and that was cheated. Films that fall into the rape/revenge genre have two distinct parts—rape and revenge—and the horror movies that adopt that do likewise, maybe with a different balance between the two. We're horrified by the first part, of course, as a group of men (and it's usually a group) rape a woman (and it's usually one woman, though sometimes it can be more). However, it passes when the victim survives the ordeal, so that we can progress to the second and much longer part, where she hunts down her rapists and elicits gruesomely bloody revenge on them all, and that's supposed to give us a level of karmic satisfaction. Unfortunately, the rape constitutes most of the book and the revenge is an anti-climactically quick three pages.

So, this is the first title on the 'Books of Horror' go to list that I haven't enjoyed, but it hasn't put me off reading more Judith Sonnet, because I can see some context here in the speed with which she challenged herself to write it and the different level of ratings on her other work. I think this probably works for some people as a sort of catharsis, because it's utterly brutal and yet they're able to survive it. Maybe some see it as a challenge, rather like 'Cows', an attempt to prove that they can get through something so outrageously taboo-breaking, to learn where the boundaries within their brains are. Maybe some truly get satisfaction out of that brief ending.

I also enjoyed the heck out of 'Cream Queen', the short story that's included in the print edition after the novella. Much of the violence in 'No One Rides for Free' is sexual and sadistic, but this is merely sexual. It's a confession published by an unnamed female character who has no reason she knows of to be out of the ordinary, except perhaps that she never orgasms during sex. However, it becomes clear to her over time that she has a very peculiar fetish. She's sexually turned on by the cream inside pimples. Yeah, that's weird, which is one reason I dig this story, but Sonnet builds an entire story around it, adding ramifications and spinning off discoveries until it reaches a telling conclusion.

'Cream Queen' is under thirty pages long, but for me it has all the depth and all the quirky charm that 'No One Rides for Free' doesn't, along with better integrated outrageous action. So yeah, I'd like to see what else Sonnet has written, but I doubt I'll ever come back to this one. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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