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Man Cave
by Angel Gelique
Torturous Tales, $18.99, 470pp
Published: July 2018

We're back in extreme horror territory, but I haven't been there for my Books of Horror Go To List project since Judith Sonnet's 'No One Rides for Free' in February. I like this one a lot more, even if at heart it's the same story: one man gains control over others and continues to abuse them until the end of the book. The most obvious difference on the surface is that there's no journey here. It pretty much all happens in the man cave of the title, which is Benjamin Merrit's detached garage, so much like Aron Beauregard's 'The Slob'. The other differences are in how this is written and I'll get to those soon enough.

Initially, this one didn't bode well. The cover art is dark, not just in theme but in colour. The title in red on almost black is readable but the tagline's problematic. "Because bad things happen", also in red on black, needed a drop shadow. The book itself is huge, running over four hundred and fifty pages, but without an accompanying word count because the font size is enormous. It's effectively large print, something I still associate with the old women who bought romance paperbacks from my charity bookstall back in the eighties. I presume they're not the target audience for this, as I'm not seeing much of a crossover between romance and torture porn. There's no justification for the text and the smart apostrophes are all backwards, even though the smart quotes are good.

In other words, the presentation didn't promise much, though I've read horrifically laid-out books before that turned out to have thoroughly enjoyable stories. I don't know that I'd lump this into a category called "enjoyable", because it is torture porn, but I found that the text is notably better than its presentation. Sure, the story is very simple, almost all of it takes place in a single location and there are precious few characters, but Angel Gelique knows how to write and presumably took the time to do it right. I still maintain 'No One Rides for Free' was poor primarily because Sonnet wrote it so quickly, as an experiment, and would have been deepened and improved by the typical draught process. The short story in the same volume was much better.

Just in case you can't imagine the story from the title and my suggestions thus far, Ben Merrit is a bad man. He's married to Mimi, who has long suffered under his stereotypical abuse but somehow put up with it. However, he sleeps around, mostly with the STD-infected town slut (possibly whore), Evie, who hangs out at a bar called Scorpions. After Mimi disappoints him yet again (because he's set her up to be disappointing), he drives out there to find her, but he finds a pair of college girls instead, Sophie and Amber. While he's thrown out for his unwelcome attentions, they soon leave too and he kidnaps them, taking them back to his man cave to use as his sex slaves.

We're only fifty pages in with four hundred to go, so there's plenty of room for Gelique to conjure up all the worst things imaginable for Ben to do to Sophie and Amber, so much room that it's easy to imagine it getting old quickly. The biggest success of the book is that it doesn't. It's also paced so quickly that the pages just keep on turning. I was shocked to realise that I'd read two hundred of them in an hour. I'm not a slow reader but that's a ridiculous pace for me, double what I would expect from even a quick read, like the 'Three Investigators' books I'm working through. I finished the entire book in under three hours.

One reason why the torture never gets old is because it's written naturally. I couldn't help feeling in 'No One Rides for Free' that Sonnet had a checklist of atrocities to shoehorn into her story and some of that felt, well, forced. Here, Gelique runs through just as many that are just as extreme, but they show up naturally. We can totally buy into Ben suddenly realising that both his prisoners are female, so asking if they've ever, you know, played together, and then forcing them to do so. It comes out of the blue for him, but in a very natural way and most of his ideas follow suit.

Two other angles played very well for me too. For one, Ben dishes all the worst abuse out to one of the girls, Sophie, but her friend Amber is right there in the room while (and after) it happens. She doesn't escape Ben's attentions—don't get the wrong idea about that—but Sophie gets them far worse. What that means is that we get two horrors instead of one at every point. What Ben does to Sophie is physically horrifying in exactly the sort of way we expect from torture porn, but it's a psychological torment for Amber at the same time, watching what's happening or knowing about it, even if she closes her eyes. That increases over time to include survivor guilt.

The other is that Ben is constantly plagued by his father's voice, which prompts him to do horrible things. It plays out rather like he's schizophrenic, but I don't think he is. I think that he was abused by his father so badly—physically, verbally and sexually—and for so long—from the age of eleven—that he can't imagine a world without his father. Therefore, even though he's long dead and has no physical part to play here, he manifests in Ben's mind and guides him into doing what he would do, were he in the same place. Just like when he was being abused as a kid, Ben has no way to stop it so has to go along. Back then it was because his father was so much more physically powerful. In the present day, it's because he has such a hold on him mentally that he's still in charge even from beyond the grave.

I don't want to give the impression that I sympathised with Ben. He's an awful person, very much a serial abuser even if his actions have a source in being abused, as, of course, they so often do. This is an extreme horror novel, so we're absolutely reading to be shocked and disgusted. However, it's got a serious side that's all about generational abuse, like so many books I'm reading this month seem to be. Ben's the villain here and there's absolutely no doubt about how monstrous he is, but he's also a victim and that's arguably why he becomes a monstrous villain. While he's upset about Mimi getting pregnant because they can't afford a baby and it would impact his comforts, we can easily believe that another reason is because he knows that he'll pass this abuse on in turn to the next generation and there's part of him that doesn't want that to happen.

There are certainly moments when Ben shows concern, empathy and humanity. If we care enough to think about this book, are those moments evidence of a decent Ben emerging from beneath the shadow of the monster or are they merely echoes of the innocent child that haven't quite vanished yet under the onslaught of his father's voice? They're enough that we find ourselves sympathising just a little, for just a moment, remembering that he's a victim too. There are points when he fails to get off because he realises that the girls aren't into what he's doing and we're emotionally hit by that moment of caring for someone else. It all makes us wonder if there's hope for him, which keeps us going through the atrocities, even though there isn't ever more than a tiny sliver and we know it. Maybe it's just a reminder of our own decency, even as we read torture porn.

I won't talk through all the extreme moments, which are what the gorehounds are going to hone in on, because, if this particular niche is up your alley, you'll want to experience those yourselves (in a manner of speaking). I will call out my favourite extreme moment though, just to highlight to everyone else why this isn't likely to be for you. There's a point when Ben acquires a new victim, a homeless man from the park, who succumbs pretty quickly to his torture. That's when he removes the corpse's penis, hollows it out with a screwdriver and then mounts the remaining flesh on the handle of a hammer so he can use it like a dildo on Amber. Just to pique your imagination, I'll also point out that that's not quite the end of that particular atrocity. So yeah, reread the paragraphs about sympathy now and see if this book is something you might want to read.

If it is, then I'd recommend it, initial presentation aside. It's more substantial and more sustained than 'The Slob' and it's deeper and better written than 'No One Rides for Free'.

If it isn't, then you probably didn't get this far into my review before wondering what's wrong with me and especially with Angel Gelique, who's written a lot more extreme horror than this and often with a female lead. I don't know if she's written 'Woman Cave' yet, but it's on her to-do list. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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