Reviewed by Mary Anne Mohanraj
(5/17/00)

I have to tell you up front that I realized, before I was very far into this book, that I am not a member of its target audience. Oh, I love smut, but to quote the intro: "Many of the stories in Viscera focus on taboo, erotica and death: the taboos of necrophilia, of blasphemous religious symbols and murder, all presented with their polar opposite -- the life-giving force of sex. Pleasure mixed with pain, as well as shame, grief and fear."

In other words, the book is often horrific as well as erotic, and while I'm a big fan of taboo-breaking, and I fully support what editor Cara Bruce has done with this book, horror just doesn't turn me on. I've seen a total of two horror movies in my life (Nightmare on Elm Street II and that nasty one about the doll that came to life and murdered people, Child's Play) -- they both gave me several nights of nightmares. I swore that I would never see a horror film again. And I haven't.

So when Cara asked me to review this book, I was a bit hesitant. I read it, but some of the stories made me want to cover my eyes with my fingers and just peek through (which works much less well with books than with cinema). Take, for instance, Simon Sheppard's "Pure Love": I love Simon's writing, but this Salome story (while hilarious) was also just a little more than I could take. For example, after the young girl gets the guy's decapitated head, we encounter lines like this: "I grab his head and bend down and kiss his mouth, which is still sorta warm... Only I can't get my tongue in his mouth till I pry open his jaws, which isn't really that hard to do...and now when I start rubbing myself against my love's head the blood starts soaking my panties..." You get the idea. And then there's Paul Bradshaw's "The Decapitation Party" -- I'm not even going to go there. Maybe I just have trouble with decapitation.

The stories are good. They just aren't for the faint of heart, or for those who prefer their smut with smiles (unless you like the faint smiles on decapitated heads...). Some of them, like "Thirty-Two Cherries" by W. Bill Czolgosz, went so far that they actually made me a bit nauseated -- no offense to the author intended.

Not all of them are gory. Most of them, however, try pretty darn hard to push your buttons. But the veteran smut readers among you probably aren't easily shocked, and to be honest, despite the gore, I wasn't really shocked by these stories either. That wasn't their appeal for me.

What I really did enjoy were the stories that weren't trying to scare you, to shock you -- the stories that were just having fun. I was really surprised by how much humor there was in this book; many of the stories are pretty darn funny, even if blood and guts are dripping all over the place. (Is this typical of horror? Maybe I'm just displaying my ignorance of the genre...)

Apparently, this surprised Cara too -- she writes in her introduction:

"I asked for sick stories. I asked for murder, disgust, and, of course, sex. I wanted pain, suffering, blood, guts, or just plain weirdness. Instead most of the stories I got made me laugh. They were so ridiculous I couldn't help it: from a modern day Salome to a decapitation party; a frat boy's date gone horribly wrong to a lonely night at the morgue..."

I think you readers might enjoy the humor here as much as Cara did. Some of the stories are creepy yet beautiful, like Astrid Fox's "Lifer," Michelle Scalise's "Wages of Faith," and Heather Corinna's "Restoration." And they're hot. Definitely hot. Or maybe icy is a better way to describe it -- like someone's just dumped a bottle full of ice water down your back, making your nipples jump and tingle.

In any case, it's a fun collection, and if you enjoy the odd, the unusual, the bizarre, you'll like this too. Me? I'd rather not have any more nightmares, so I'm going to to go curl up with a nice copy of The Hobbit, or maybe Little Women...