I enjoyed Peter N. Dudar's The Goat Parade, but to be honest, the cover of Blood Cult of the Booby Farmers was always a turn-off. It was a little to "out there" for my tastes, but having had the opportunity to read (and enjoy) a potential sequel, The Mississippi Glory Hole Mutilations, I figured I'd have to shrug off my initial impressions of the Booby Farmers cover and read it. And what a read!
Dudar doesn't waste any time throwing you into the thick of things. Right away we're introduced to Mathias Tucker, an inbred hillbilly whose twin brother is literally attached to his chest. Yes, they are conjoined twins. The cost of separating them is prohibitive, which is only one of the reasons why Lee Tucker never had his sons separated. Besides the money not being there, there was a high risk of neither brother surviving, and Lee needed the extra pair of hands to run the farm, along with his other son, Tobias. And while both matured in one respect, Bubba, the conjoined twin, never fully developed, and he had a constant craving for mother's milk. But since there were no women in residence on the Tucker farm, that meant it had to be obtained in other ways. Usually by kidnapping expectant mothers. As long as they could provide sustenance for Bubba, they were allowed to live. But more often than not, their lives were cut short by Mathias because as Bubba fed, Mathias raped them, thus satisfying two hungers at one time. Which left Tobias to discard the bodies, but not before severing the breasts, which would be served up for dinner. They have a neat little operation going on, and no one was the wiser. If only they could keep up with the payments on the property.
You know where this is going. The bank is going to foreclose, and the Tucker men think they've got it all figured out until the effects of the toxic poisoning of the environment by the Atkins Chemical Company begin to manifest. And that's where I'm going to leave it, because to say anything more would only spoil the wild ride the rest of the book takes you on. But if you think what I've revealed is wild, you ain't seen nothing yet. To quote Bette Davis: "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."
I'll be the first to admit that I've shied away from extreme horror because, from what I've heard of it, it doesn't seek to arouse a sense of dread and fear in the reader the way horror should; instead, it goes for the gross out. The author attempts to see how far they can push the reader to instill a reaction, not through suspense, but through the vulgar, the repulsive, the sickening, and the gross, which, to me, is not horror, much the way movies like the Saw franchise never appealed to me because it was nothing more than torture porn. While Dudar's novella might be a little tame where "extreme horror" is concerned, it certainly is a book to get your feet if you haven't ventured into this sub genre of horror yet. It also dips its toes into bizarro fiction, which is another sub genre I haven't fully immersed myself in (I have read some, and walked away scratching my head, wondering what the point was of what I'd just read). The author introduces characters and provides the reader just enough back story for you to care about them, but then exposes the chinks in their armor, showing the reader that they aren't as good as the reader was led to believe, and you want to say everybody got their just desserts, but no matter how tarnished characters like Betty-June Gray might be, they don't deserve the torments visited upon them. Nobody does. Well, except for the Tuckers. They got off too easy if you ask me. And as the events unfold, you read with wide-eyed bewilderment and wonder just how much further the author can go?
Would I recommend this? Definitely. As I said, it's a mild book by extreme standards, but it does go where the squeamish fear to tread, and be forewarned... This book is not for people who are easily offended. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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