I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Slaughterhouse Moan by Daniel J. Volpe on August 29, 2025
Genres: Splatterpunk
Goodreads
Life on the farm isn’t easy, especially when a pig mutant is hunting you.
In the summer of 2003, four friends are headed to Florida for one last hoorah before college, Davey needs a job to appease his parole officer, and Beulah is doing her best to keep her pig farm afloat while caring for her teenage daughter. Their lives are about to collide in an unexpected and terrifying way.
Beulah Winslow lived a hard life of drug abuse and sexual escapades in New York before taking over the family pig farm after her father up and left. Her daughter, Hattie, unfortunately, bears the scars of her bad decisions; literally. Davey is a local loser in his thirties who desperately needs a job. Desperate to keep his parole officer off his back and himself out of prison, he takes a job as a farmhand on the Winslow farm. JD, Ari, Danielle, and Rich are on their way to Florida for one last hoorah before the end of their senior year. Unfortunately, a flat tire leaves them stranded in a cabin on the Winslow farm. None of these poor souls are ready for the absolute terror that lurks in the slaughterhouse.
On the surface, Slaughterhouse Moan is a small-town slasher with an early 2000s vibe. Volpe managed to take the “five friends in a spooky location” trope, rip it apart, and reconstruct it in a new, imaginative way. Like any other typical slasher, you would expect a story like this to have the teens as the primary focus. Instead, the real story comes from Beulah and Hattie and their lives in New York, told through flashback chapters. While Davey and the teens may seem like secondary characters, they represent the consequences of Beulah’s choices. I also appreciate the fact that Volpe didn’t give the teens the typical horror archetypes like the stoner, the jock, the slut, and the brainiac.
Being a modern splatterpunk novel, there are some devices you would expect, such as extreme gore and disgusting prose. More often than not, they only serve to provide shock value or solidify a splatterpunk classification and rarely add anything of value to the story. Volpe, thankfully, managed to limit the extreme to the moments that call for it and avoids going so over the top that it becomes silly.
He also did something I’ve rarely seen done in modern splatterpunk, which is limit the sexual assaults to off-page. I’m almost inclined to label this as refined splatterpunk. I think Kristopher Triana and Oscar Brady also fit into this category. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my over-the-top extreme horror like Playground and No One Rides for Free, but I also like having options.
Slaughterhouse Moan is a grotesque and brilliant horror story that drives home the old saying, ‘you reap what you sew.’ If you are a lover of psychological horror or body horror and you’re looking for something with a bit more umph, this is the read for you. Daniel J. Volpe is well on his way to becoming this generation’s Jack Ketchum.
Slaughterhouse Moan will be available August 29th, 2025, at djvhorror.com.
I received an early copy for review directly from Daniel.
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