They’re the baddest of bad bitches. But can they take on the living dead?
Halloween is one of the year’s most lucrative flesh peddling nights at The Threshold, a stately brothel that neighbors Shadow Oaks Memorial Cemetery.
Accordingly, Madam Strangely has assembled her five best girls, all in costume, to ensure the dollars keep flowing in.
Unfortunately, on Devil’s Night this year, a couple knuckleheads found out the hard way what happens when you disturb the dead’s eternal slumber.
Now the madam, her girls, and their so-called gentlemen callers must face off against an army of pissed off and upsettingly horny zombies.
When it comes to extreme horror comedy, James Oliver is the first name that comes to mind. While the majority of his works wouldn’t necessarily fall into horror comedy, books like Mr. Durty, Full Body Dismemberment, and Big Dogs Club are definitely more humorous than most, at least in my opinion. So when James asked if I wanted an ARC of Halloween Night at the Whorehouse by the Cemetery, there was no way I was going to pass that up.
In typical Oliver fashion, we start right off the bat with violence and gore through the first-person perspective of a zombie in the book’s prologue, which I thought was pretty cool, and I would love to see him write more in that style. But once we hit chapter one, I feel like James thought, “How can I make my readers gag the most?” Well, let me tell you.
This might be the first time I’ve read a book where the zombie outbreak started from two dudes, Dave and Von, digging up a couple of corpses to get their rocks off. What in the ICP? That’s just the beginning. The mung is where my gag reflex started to tingle. No one can say James isn’t inventive; that’s for sure. Things start to heat up when women of The Threshold come into play; that would be the whorehouse by the cemetery.
This is where some readers might assume the book is just a story full of sexism and violence against women, considering it is an extreme horror novel. However, if you know James’s work, he’s very careful in how he writes women, and the ladies of The Threshold are no different. When the zombies show up at their door, Madame Eileen Strangley becomes a general commanding her troops, including the Johns. I love that the book doesn’t take the approach that men must protect women. Instead, fighting off the zombie apocalypse is a joint effort.
The book’s pacing is pretty good, and if you’re new to James Oliver’s writing, you’ll notice he likes to jump between scenes with a huge cast of characters, but that’s where I think his style excels. Reading one of his books is literally like watching a film in your mind. And while all of that is going on, he has a knack for dropping horror movie references throughout the book. Sometimes they’re obvious, and often they’re subtle, but horror fans will pick them out right away.
Halloween Night at the Whorehouse by the Cemetery provides every horror fan with the gore, humor, and sex we love. It’s almost like if Lloyd Kaufman wanted to make a film adaptation of a book, this would be the one. It’s perfect for Troma’s library. It’s just a fun book to read and one that’ll be on my spooky season rotation.
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