Death can be a real downer. Just ask Stanley McCloud. The ancient and inveterate gambler has just found out he hasn’t long to live. Refusing to believe his prognosis, though, Stan places a massive bet that he will reach his next birthday. Surely, his run of bad luck can’t last!
Unfortunately for Stan the independent bookie he uses grows nervous as the big day approaches and decides to bump him off with one of her many fun, but ever-so-slightly fatal, high-odds proposition bets – aka Maggy’s Specials.
Will Stanley McCloud make it, ruining Maggy McCulloch in the process; or will the heartless bookie have her evil way, ‘accidentally’ kill him, and save her business? Perhaps Stan’s womanising, alcoholic old pal Dougie can be of some help? Yeah, right! Good luck with that. Oh, and there’s a whole secondary storyline about The Head Honcho, a serial killer who leaves his victims’ torsos in one place, and their heads in another. Yikes!
Dark bleatings, my lovely tribe. This doesn’t happen often at all but…I have been rendered almost speechless by this book, but let me go ahead and try to review it!
So, this is a dark comedy, but by “dark”, we mean daaaaark. Imagine Monty Python but if it belonged to the extreme horror subgenre, that’s the kind of comedy we’re talking here.
Stanley learns that he has a limited time to live and makes a bet with a woman that he’ll make it to his next birthday, but she decides to try to off him before then, just in case. What follows is…absolute carnage and madness. It’s a dark premise handled in a way that had me laughing out loud across several pages. The same kind of humour that I love Mark Towse and Adam Millard for, but it’s just much much darker!
It’s a character driven story that has two concurrent plots, which are fun but I’d say secondary to the people we’re dealing with, in terms of focus. That’s fine by me because I care way more about character than anything else when I’m enjoying a story.
I normally try to write a bit more when I review things but in the case of this novel, I’d say the less you know going in, the more enjoyable and surprising your reading experience will be. I’d recommend this to dark comedy fans, of course, but also to people who enjoy splatterpunk.
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you. Ooh, and as an additional FYI, Adrian Baldwin is also a fantastic cover artist!
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
Leave a comment