The Radioactive Bride

Stoker Award–winner Manzetti (Naraka) overwhelms the senses in this gory, disgusting carnival of vignettes set across continents in a postapocalyptic future. Forty years after the meteorite Uxor 77 led to a pandemic of genetic mutations that swept the Earth, the Parisian elite have monetized the bodies of the unlucky masses in exclusive brothels, freak shows, and fine dining establishments where the wealthy feast on human meat. Meanwhile in Berlin, the population is re-divided by an electrified sewer-wall into Western Puritans and lawless Eastern cannibals, and Germany’s gluttonous president keeps a menagerie of butchered, but still living, body parts. And, in what once was India, cults have formed in worship of the meteorite fragments. Gruesome, often misogynistic scenes pass in a whirlwind of depravity, cannibalism, and stomach-churning body horror, without relief or a larger message. Manzetti’s characterization of the pandemic as having “the creativity and sadism of a drunk motherfucker god” aptly describes this collection as a whole. Readers will need strong stomachs to weather this relentless, gleefully violent, and pointless work of hardcore horror. (May.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly referred to this book as a novel.