Happy Goat Horror

SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD WINNER!
BRAM STOKER AWARD NOMINATED

With these twelve stories Paula D. Ashe takes you into a dark and bloody world where nothing is sacred and no one is safe. A landscape of urban decay and human degradation, this collection finds the psychic pressure points of us all, and giddily squeezes. Try to run, try to hide, but there is no escape: we are here to hurt each other.

CONTENT WARNINGS FOUND INSIDE BOOK

Dark bleatings, my glorious tribe! I’m talking about a book by Paula D. Ashe today, an author that’s totally new to me. It’s a collection of stories that disturbed me to no end. Let’s dive in!

ASPECTS OF EMPTINESS

Everyone has a face beneath the one we wear. A face only truly visible in the dark. Once you see it, you simply cannot abide the mask you’ve been wearing all this time…

Hideous. Absolutely hideous, spooky, terrifying in concept. Loved it.

CARRY ON, CARRION

A woman (from the first story I think) is kidnapped, rendered unconscious, and taken somewhere where she’s tied to a chair. A mysterious man gives her an option that you’d think no one would ever even consider, but…

Once again, brutal but brilliant horror.

ALL THE HELLISH CRUELTIES OF HEAVEN

Some sort of god/witch (at least she believes she is, I’m not sure) admires a serial killer with ritualistic flair. Like recognises like, apparently. This felt very open-world to me, like it could reappear anywhere in the rest of the collection.

GRAVE MIRACLES

Reads like instructions for a ritual. Made my drum my fingertips together like Mr Burns from The Simpsons, all devious like.

EXILE IN EXTREMIS

Found this fascinating and was sorry when it ended because I was engrossed. Email correspondence between Elle – someone who always knows things the public don’t, who wrote an article about something weird – and David. Women are going missing, Elle is writing about it, and David is overly invested because he knows one of the women. I won’t say any more because of spoilers but let me say this – reads like a Clive Barker story, if Clive Barker took off the rose-tinted glasses. And that’s saying something.

JACQUELINE LAUGHS LAST IN THE GASLIGHT

It’s 1888 and ladies of the night are getting slaughtered left, right, and centre. A Jack the Ripper story that does let us in on the horrifying answer of who the culprit is at the end.

BECAUSE YOU WATCHED

Good grief. A woman is taken by her brother back to her childhood home, where she doesn’t want to go, where her sister and baby niece are waiting for them. It’s frickin’ horrible. Outrageously horrible. Really well told story though.

A NEEDLESHINE LITANY

A heinous man with wretched plans takes a little girl somewhere, but this doesn’t go to the soul destroying place I feared and offered a glimpse of hope in all the surrounding bleakness.

THE MOTHER OF ALL MONSTERS

Does evil run in families? There’s a rash of murders of little girls, and that’s really all I can tell you without spoiling it because anything else I mention might clue you in too much to how the story unfolds. It’s a favourite, I thought it was excellent, even if the subject matter is dark and the ending made me read it through squinted eyes.

THE WITNESS

A woman observes, with pleasure, the horrible, painful deaths of lots of people. This is a short, brutal snapshot of suffering.

BEREFT

Jesus Christ. Bloody hell. And holy crap.

You might have guessed that I was verily disturbed by this one and because of the subject matter (which the author does give us fair warning about), it was a really unpleasant read. I can’t bring myself to say I outright didn’t like it because the way the author writes is enjoyable, which makes for confusing times when the story is like…this.

TELESIGNATURES FROM A FUTURE CORPSE

A cop is hunting down a serial killer that has a pattern with the number of victims, what they do to them, how far apart the murders are, etc. The cop eventually realises that the killer’s methods are, let’s say, unconventional. It’s the longest story in the book and by this point, has a predictably savage revelation, but was great.

Overall, I think this collection is excellent but it’s also, mostly, pretty grim to read. It’s not what I would call “my kind” of horror at all – I tend to prefer the fluffier side of the genre. You know, zombies ripping out your innards and such. This is so dark but also unflinching in its honesty about the deep depravation of some people. In fact, it poses the question of how far most of us would drown in those depths given the right circumstances, and the unpleasant conclusion I came to is that most people are not just soaring above a particular line of human indecency. I think a lot of people are capable of much worse than they think.

If you enjoy extreme horror and splatterpunk, you’ll probably consider this a masterpiece. Though not what I would normally like to read, I think it was brilliant, even if I am now scarred for life. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:

WE ARE HERE TO HURT EACH OTHER

PAULA D. ASHE

Bleeeeat!