Steve Goodwin & Rog Pile (eds.) – Filthy Creations #3 (Autumn-Winter, 2007)
Rog Pile
Franklin Marsh – Better To Travel Hopefully
Coral King – Heads Or Tails
Daniel McGachey – The Mound
Noah Brown – Daemonia Of Swan-man
Peter Coady – The Standing Man
Craig Herbertson – Strange Fruit
Franklin Marsh – The Horror Of Dreadstone Moor [Part III]
Feeding time with the alligators: a cheerful, protective shrunken head with a strong sense of right and wrong: Jamesian shudders with a mobile burial mound: unflinching “let’s go kill some swans!” action: a permanent holiday in limbo, and the Southern trees once again bear a strange fruit now the sun-shield’s have failed ….
Business as usual at Filthy Creations!
Franklin Marsh – Better To Travel Hopefully …: Tasty tropical chiller. Experienced hit-man Dalrymple is hired by powerful businessman Stevenson to kill his wife, Ivana, who’s taken up refuge with her Indian servant in the Amazon jungle. Dalrymple hasn’t a prayer. Ivana is clairvoyant and saw him coming as, indeed, she has his several predecessors. She has a tried and trusted method for getting rid of these “little nuisances” ….
Franklin is also represented by part three of his black sorcery epic, The Horror Of Dreadstone Moor. In this episode, Ripton and his uncle Gregory recruit everybody’s favourite Rocking Reverend, Vic “The Riff” Riffle to their campaign versus the cannibalistic Grubblings. Ripton also gets to follow top Goth Elizabeth’s “amazing black satin-clad rear down the stairs” as they set off for the Amazing Henna Kaleidoscope gig in the village, so things are finally looking up for him in that department, too.
Coral King – Heads Or Tails: Pregnant Rebecca, verbally, physically and sexually abused by the domineering man in her life, is befriended by JoJo, a chatty shrunken head she inadvertently picked up at the village greengrocer’s. JoJo successfully oversees the birth of her son, then fixes it that neither Bec nor the boy will endure Mr. Hobson any longer.
Something of an emotional roller-coaster. The amiable head gets all the best dialogue and is as amusing as the bully’s antics are deeply unpleasant to read. It’s unfair to spoil the ending so let’s just say I didn’t see it coming.
Daniel McGachey – The Mound: “Mr. Elmsmore instantly had the impression that what he was looking at was, in fact, a grave; an unmarked burial mound that, night after night, approached that degree closer to the house or, and Elmsmore, would never normally be described as a superstitious man, encroached upon one of the houses inhabitants”.
Everything is rosy for Mr. Elmsmore since his head gardener, Mr. Galton, drained and sealed the old well in the garden. It wasn’t a pleasant job, what with all the gnawed bones Galton and his assistants found down there, some of them worryingly human looking. Elmsmore becomes increasingly obsessed with the shifting hump until one night he can take it no longer and, armed with a torch and shovel, he gets stuck into a moonlight dig …
Dan’s work revives the spirit of the much-missed M.R. James freak’s bible, Ghosts & Scholars. It’s unlikely that our next contributor would ever have troubled it’s hallowed pages because it’s ….
Noah Brown – Daemonia Of Swan-Man: Whenever I’ve read him, Bushwick’s work always puts me in mind of Jim Thirlwell in his You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath incarnation. There’s no messing about: it is straight on through to the heart of darkness, ugly stories that want to be loathed. This time out we have a four year old boy accompanying his dad on a search and mission in the van. They are off to kill some swans because, when he was his son’s age, dad was raped by a swan-human hybrid and he hates the “evil cunts”. If I say that the least disturbing thing about this story is Dad’s choice of motivational music – a bloody Saxon cassette! – you’ll know that this gets very nasty indeed. And how evil is that kiss off? Truly f**k**g remarkable.
Peter Coady – The Standing Man: Not a story that lends itself to the demonik smash and grab “then this happened, then that happened ….” school of boring review as it’s all mood. The standing man is truly suspended in dusk, not yet dead but you’d hardly call it living.
Craig Herbertson – Strange Fruit: After the Silo Wars, the surviving humans put their synthetic slaves to work on farms much as the zombies were reputed to toil in the cane fields of Haiti. Occasionally, one of these Straw Men will go wild and then there’s trouble. The narrator, locally unpopular for his stance on Straw Men’s rights, accompanies his friend, Solon, to Colonel Chevalis’s estate after his children have been ritually mutilated by one such renegade. Chevalis is unusually acquiescent when Solon requests permission to hunt for the killer on his property.
There’s a horrible significance in the choice of title.
Had a most enjoyable three quarters of an hour reacquainting myself with #3. Without wishing to do an injustice to either project by lumping them together, the FC‘s are the ideal companion to Charles’ Black Books Of Horror.
See also the Filthy 3 thread on Vault of Evil
Vault Of Evil 