Human-Shaped Fiends by Chandler Morrison
"Justice doesn't have anything to do with anything."
Boring. Chandler Morrison's brand of 'shocking for the sake of being shocking' extreme 'horror' is—for lack of a better word—boring. The fact that he then injects the meta exercise of literary masturbation that is autofiction into the mix makes it insufferably boring.
I get that Morrison is trying to be subversive by dismantling the (splatter) western genre by taking its tropes to 'shocking' extremes, but he's very clearly not clever—or talented—enough to effectively pull it off. Instead, we're left with a paint-by-numbers western that so badly wants to be some sort of spiritual successor to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian—just, y'know, without the thematic weight or the gargantuan literary talent of Cormac McCarthy—thus making it little more than a hodgepodge of juvenile scenes of r*pe and m*rder clumsily interwoven with delusional, over-the-top autofiction 'satire' that never manages to achieve anything besides shining a light on Morrison's clear disdain not only for this genre, but for his fans. He's very clearly bored of writing this sh*t. But not nearly as bored as I was while reading this sh*t.
2/10
-Timothy Patrick Boyer.
