I've mentioned the Books of Horror Facebook group in a few of my reviews now and it remains one of the friendliest and most useful groups on the platform, even though it's above 30,000 members nowadays. Most groups that size descend into chaos but this one, as busy as it is, continues to work well, partly due to the presence of authors from self-published first-timers to Grand Masters with a bunch of Bram Stoker Awards, each of whom actually contribute rather than just lurk and promote, but also partly due to a general acceptance of and openness to indie horror.

With help from that membership, I put together a list of books that get mentioned all the time, so that it could serve as an introductory reading list for the group and also one I could dive into for an upcoming zine. I set up an Amazon registry containing those books for family members to buy for a recent birthday and now I'm starting my exploration of that highly varied list with a title by one of those indie authors who contributes constantly to the group, Duncan Ralston, who's Canadian.

It's my first by him and it's generally described as "extreme horror" by readers, a term sprawled on the bottom of the front cover. It's a tag that I'm eager to figure out during this project, given that this doesn't seem to fit. Sure, it's short and tackles a set of taboo subjects, but it's far from being as gratuitous as a whole bunch of horror novels I read back in the eighties; down to those Herberts and Hutsons that we kids used to share on playgrounds. Everything in the book has a reason to be in the book and it all helps to get us to a logical conclusion.

That conclusion may be the weakest aspect to the book, because I saw it coming in the first half. It's probably a much bigger shock to someone who wasn't specifically thinking about how it would end up and I'm sure it would be a more impactful book to readers who didn't put all the clues together. However, it's still a good ending and it comprises the sort of imagery that ought to resonate with us over a long period of time. It's not quickly forgotten and it may well be that 'Woom' comes up so often in Books of Horror precisely because of that imagery.

The structure is a framing novella broken up by the two primary characters sharing a set of shorter stories. Most are told by Johnny, who's very deliberately checked into room 6 at the Lonely Motel and ordered himself a plus-sized professional lady of the evening. It's an important location for him because he's been there before, at a variety of pivotal moments in his life, which he describes in a set of stories to Shyla, while he's having her stretch her lady parts with an increasingly large set of sex toys.

I did mention lasting imagery, right? Well, that memorable image is just the first of many to come, no pun intended, because each of these stories introduces another one, before we're returned to the framing story and attempt to figure out where Ralston's going with this. Given that each of the stories counts as a puzzle piece and the puzzle doesn't contain that many of them, I'm not going to spoil any. Quite frankly, what I've said thus far has probably either put you off this book for life and you haven't made it this far into the review or you're back after ordering your own copy online.

Thinking back a couple of weeks after reading it, all those abiding images are still with me and I'm all the more surprised at how touching the story is. It feels like it ought to be blatantly gratuitous, but it isn't. He doesn't shock us with adjectives and metaphors, relishing each description of these outrageous images. He just has Johnny, for the most part, recount his stories and let things unfold within them naturally and in a matter of fact tone.

It's only as we think back at just how much goes on within a mere 129 pages that we start to realise just how outrageous it all became and wonder why we weren't grossed out by such a deluge of wild and often taboo imagery. The answer to that is that, while reading, we simply felt for Johnny and for Shyla, if not always for the other characters who feature in the stories they tell, because it may be fair to say that many of them deserve exactly what they got. Even when we reach the final wild image, it just makes sense. Even though there are certain circumstances that strip away some of our sympathy from Johnny, we still understand why he does what he does and we feel for him and hope that it brought him some long overdue peace. That's good writing.

On Goodreads, Ralston does not suggest that people start exploring his work with 'Woom' but, as I've just done that successfully, I might beg to differ. Perhaps he's fairly suggesting that he's got a lot more varied work in print than something this extreme. He's written ghost stories and thrillers that presumably have to generate their imagery from far less taboo components. He suggests one of his short story collections instead, like 'Video Nasties'. The other title of his that's mentioned a lot in Books of Horror is 'Ghostland', which is as fat as this is lean. I'll certainly look into more of his books, once I've worked through this list. ~~ Hal C F Astell