Readers with a taste for the blood and guts of films like The Devil's Rejects
will enjoy Skipp's latest excursion into "Splatterpunk," the horror subgenre he cofounded that emphasizes explicit sex and violence as a means of communicating a visceral experience. A mysterious stranger shows up at a rural strip club right before closing time, initiating a series of events that escalates beyond anyone's control. The stranger, you see, reveals to the club's denizens their true natures. Skipp (Mondo Zombie
) originally pitched the book as a movie idea—think Stephen King's Needful Things
meets From Dusk to Dawn
—but such a synopsis doesn't do justice to the author's depiction of the mutual parasitism of the dancers, who hate the patrons who degrade and exploit them, and the audience, trapped by loneliness, who despise the strippers for presenting an unattainable ideal of perfection. (June)
