Apeshit by Carlton Mellick III

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Friday the 13th meets Visitor Q" promises the back cover copy of Carlton Mellick III's Apeshit, and that's exactly what the book delivers; this is the literary equivalent of a Takashi Miike slasher flick, reveling in the conventions of B-movie horror, yet layering on enough gore, gristle, and grotesquerie to make even Kane Hodder squeamish. At the heart of the novel's plot is the requisite group of horny teenagers, heading out to the requisite isolated cabin in the woods for the requisite weekend of partying and debauchery. But this is Bizarro territory, so this cast of teens includes a Mohawked cheerleader covered in full-body butterfly tattoos, an obsessive tooth-brusher with a vagina dentata, and an abortion porn aficionado. Yeah, it's that kind of book. Characterization is a bit uneven*, and many of the protagonists become downright unlikable over the novel's course, but then again, the fact that the aforementioned horny teens are monsters themselves is kind of the point. Apeshit is, at turns, strange, disgusting, surprising, disturbing, and riotously funny.


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* Particularly with regards to Buddy the Lobster Boy, Apeshit's killer mutant. While Buddy does appear to share some literary DNA with John Gardner's Grendel ("It sees lights in the distance. Lights in a place that is usually dark. There is something bad about these lights. Something evil. It has to make the lights go away. It has to make the evil, all evil, go away."), ultimately, Buddy is underdeveloped and underutilized as a character, making his transition from villain to victim far less satisfying than it might otherwise be.