Flesh Gothic

Rating:
Summary: Disturbingly Captivating
Review: I'm a sucker for graphic horror, and this book does not disappoint. It opens up rather predictably, but Lee's skill with words makes a common storyline seem new. The story is a 'haunted house' type tale, with several popular themes, but the way Lee writes allows the reader to forget that they've read this type of thing before. It's got lots of the captivating twisted sexuality, which is always a bonus to this type of story, in my opinion. There is also quite a bit of reference to paranormalists and the trappings therein, so if you like stories about ghosthunting, you'll like this one.



Rating:
Summary: Flesh Gothic, by Ed Lee
Review: On April 3rd, in a mansion tucked away in the woods in a small Florida town, twenty-seven people were slaughtered in anticipation of some unknown event yet to come. Twenty-six of those bodies were recovered. The man behind the massacre was Reginald Hidlreth. Two weeks later, his wife Vivica hires a team of psychics, a demonologist, and a reporter, to enter the house and find out, not only what happened to her husband--his body was never recovered and it's unknown whether he's alive or dead--but more importantly, what was he planning and when was it was supposed to take place?

Wow, a story about a team of investigators going into the big haunted mansion? Never read a story like that before. Well, except for Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House". Oh, and Richard Mattheson's "Hell House." Considering the mansion in Ed Lee's "Flesh Gothic" is the Hildreth Mansion, you think it's got something to do with the letter H in all those house names?

Anyway. The second I realized what was going on, that's when I really started enjoying this story. Because I knew that if the idea was such a well-known one, and he was doing it anyway, Ed Lee must have something special in mind. And he did. "Flesh Gothic" is anything but a typical "group of people in the haunted house" story. This isn't some standard evil ghost we're dealing with in this place. This is Belarius, Lucifer's first servant in Hell. That's quite a step up from the plots we're used to.

When Reginald Hildreth bought the mansion, he turned it into a porn studio for his business T&T Enterprises. They used the mansion for their locations, and the stars used it as their home. On the night of April 3rd, all of them were killed, their blood drained into buckets, and the walls were then painted red. This was done in sacrifice to Belarius, so he would open the Rive and let Hildreth enter the Chirice Flaesc. Two weeks later, Hildreth's "widow" Vivaca hires the team of experts to go into the house and find out what happened.

She brings in Adrianne, a remote viewer, Cathleen, a clairvoyant, medium, and telekinetic, Willis, a tactionist, Nyvysk, ex-priest, demonologist, and exorcist, and Westmore, a freelance reporter. Also present to keep an eye on things are Karen and Mack, ex-T&T employees.

The group sets up their equipment and begins exploring the house. Immediately, the psychics are bombarded with horrible images. Willis sees something in one of the rooms that's so horrifying he's almost paralyzed with it. Karen, Cathleen and Adrianne are raped. Not by ghosts, everyone agrees, but by revenants, soulless spirits, Adiposians, created from rendered fat in the Chirice Flaesc. Nyvysk is confronted by a spirit from his own past. The only one who seems immune to the effects of the house is Westmore, an ex-alcoholic who doesn't believe in psychics and spirits, but who's there to do a job for Vivica Hildreth.

Watching from his car, parked in the woods outside the mansion, is Clements, an ex-cop who was hired to find out what happened to Debbie Rodenbaugh, the only person in the house on the night of April 3rd whose body was never found. As Westmore's investigations inside the house lead him closer to the secret of that night, he and Clements might have more in common than you'd think as Debbie Rodenbaugh just might be the key to what happened, or what's gong to happen.

This is a book that keeps its secrets close and hides them well until it's ready to reveal them. Almost any other writer out there, if given this old standard to work with, would have gone in much the same tired direction as everyone else and produced a very poor Shirley Jackson or Richard Mattheson copy. But as we've seen from his previous novels, Ed Lee's not any other writer and he's not going to be satisfied with just another haunted house investigation story. In fact, the real story here isn't even so much about the house as it is about Reginald Hildreth and what he had planned on that night of April 3rd--and what he still has planned, because April 3rd was only the beginning, and unbeknownst to the team inside the house, that plan is still in motion.

I really liked the way Lee drew these characters, letting us meet each of them individually (except Adrianne and Cathleen, whom we meet on a plane together on their way to the mansion--but it's just the two of them, so we're still able to get to know them individually before they're thrust into the group environment), and we're allowed to see their lives, where they're coming from and how they got to this point. He's got such a knack for characters, creating these fully formed, three-dimensional people whom he can then throw into these incredibly vile situations and see how they react. I love that about his work.

I also liked the backstory. So far this year I've read four novels in which some aspect of the heaven/hell mythology is rewritten and expanded on. First in Adrienne Jones's upcoming novels "The Hoax" and "Oral Vices", then in Ed Lee's "The Messenger" and now "Flesh Gothic". If these two writers knew each other, I'd wonder if this was some plan they had, but they don't, so it must be coincidence.

There was only one problem with "Flesh Gothic", as far as I could see, and that's this: once they begin to realize that things inside the house are real--all three women are raped at different times, Nyvysk uses his equipment to verify the house is, in "expert" talk, "charged"--they continue to search the house alone. After being raped once already, both Adrianne and Cathleen still insist on venturing throughout the house by themselves. They know what happened there, it's all in the police report, but they don't really seem too affected by it. If I'm in a house in which twenty-six bodies were chopped to pieces, and three women tell me they were raped by some unseen force, you can bet I'm not going too awful far away from where everyone else is.

But they're supposed to be old pros at what they do, so in their world, maybe it's not so outlandish. I wouldn't do it, though.

When I first started reading Ed Lee, it was one hardcore story after another, one step deeper into the depravity well. The thing was, he was GOOD at it. The sickness in his stories always somehow came about as part of the plot, they never seemed tossed in their for shock value, which is how just about every other story of that type comes off. But in the past couple years, I've come to see that he's not just a shock writer, that's just something he does for a very specific audience. But when he's writing for the general public, he's even more engaging. And his prose flies by. I started this book on a Sunday, and I'd reached page 80 before lunch. I never read anything that fast, but Lee kept my eyes on the page and never once gave me a moment to look up and check the clock, or look ahead and see how many pages were left of that chapter. He grabbed me in the beginning and kept me there from page one. There's not a lot of writers who can do that, but Ed Lee seems to do it over and over. I don't mind. With all the crappy writing out there from authors who should know better, thank God someone can.