Bryan Smith’s DEPRAVED is everything you want in a novel: black-humored, violent and nasty — you know, real “read me a story, Daddy” stuff. Just skim the jacket copy and you’ll think this is another example of been-there/read-that hillbilly horror. You know the kind of thing I mean: a couple or small group of young people stop at a back-road gas station to get directions and end up on the unpaved highway to hell.
But don’t assume you know where this bad-tempered little mofo is headed. Ah, no.
Smith hits you with a big switcharoo in the first two pages. He opens the story with Jessica Sloane tooling along in a red ’63 Falcon Futura, thinking of a good-looking Nashville musician named Hoke. He’s scruffy and exists around the edges of the music biz, but he has a “cut-rate charm and easy grin.”
He sold her this car and “In younger days, she would have been all over him. Would maybe have dragged him into the Falcon’s backseat as an extra way of consummating the deal.” It’s a conventional moment that gets us into this young woman’s head and begins to put us on her side when —
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
— noises start issuing from the car’s trunk and we learn quickly that Jessica forced Hoke into the trunk because he raped her earlier that morning and she’s taking him out into the country to insert a bullet or two into his head.
Our foot has just slipped off the first rock and we’re not going to totally regain our balance for next 322 pages. If then.
After talking her abuser out of the trunk, Jessica and Hoke quickly run afoul of members of the Kincher family, a clan of hillbilly mutants that make your standard-issue carnival freaks look like The Brady Bunch. Then Smith introduces us to Megan and Pete, that couple at the gas station that gets separated and captured — he to get tossed into a cage with Justine, a gorgeous prisoner who is okay as long as her meds hold out, but is a ravening sex fiend and killer when nature takes its course. Megan gets grabbed by Sheriff DeMars and Deputy Hall, who determine to sell her to the Sin Den, a combination strip club, whorehouse, kink palace and death chamber. Our last significant captive is Michelle, held prisoner in a basement where she is tortured by 20-year-old latent lesbian Abby.
Why are all these outlanders being held? It’s almost time for the yearly festival, at which they will be slaughtered and eaten.
There is a reason for all this mayhem and perversity, but come on, do you really care? This is one deranged Herschell Gordon Lewis of a book. The influence of that schlock moviemaker’s TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! is abundantly apparent. You might tell yourself while your eyes are glued to that alternative-classic film that you’re crazy to keep watching it, and you might think you should put this novel down and read something with at least a smidgeon of socially redeeming content. But when I tell you that Pete and Justine will eventually take a chainsaw to their tormenters, you and I both know that you’re not going anywhere.
Smith’s plot, as goofy and over-the-top as it is, has more twists in it than a snake with scoliosis, and that simile is representative of the book’s manic political incorrectness. This book is not nice. This book is not genteel. This book is sick, noxious, and fun.
It is, in short, DEPRAVED. Truth is advertising, mano. Gotta love it. —Doug Bentin
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• DEATHBRINGER by Bryan Smith
• THE FREAKSHOW by Bryan Smith
• HOUSE OF BLOOD by Bryan Smith
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- House of Blood
- Dark Harvest
