Bad Dreams

this is from a review of my book:
Fans of "splatterpunk" style horror will get a satisfying fix of mayhem and violence from "A Taste of Blood," Jeffrey Able's collection of short fiction, but there's far more to appreciate in his stories than shock value. While offerings such as "Bad Dreams," "Muddy Lake," "Elvis in the Mirror," and "Poetic Justice" are soaked in all the gore, deviancy, and dark humor a horror fan could ask for, they use those genre hallmarks as exclamation points to emphasize outrage at social evils like racism, homophobia, and toxic masculinity. "Muddy Lake" is a particularly timely story about a crooked legal system that lets sexual predators off the hook while punishing their victims. It uses the horror genre to deliver satisfying eye-for-an-eye justice, using violence not to degrade, but to drive home a stark moral point about the real-world horrors of a culture and mentality that fails sexual assault victims. It's a socially conscious, yet sinisterly entertaining read.

Elsewhere, "Bad Dreams" sensitizes the reader to the horrors of racism by showing it through the eyes of an abused young man tyrannized by his monstrous father, and "Poetic Justice" reads like a Stephen King story as told by Hubert Selby, Jr. In fact, I thought of both authors frequently as I read the collection; there's the former's preoccupation with monstrosity, human and supernatural, overlapping with the everyday, and the latter's compassion for and rage against the damage caused by deranged, egotistical men and the culture that enables them.

As a fan of many graphic and disturbing horror novels and films, I think of myself as being a fairly jaded consumer, but as I read "Elvis in the Mirror," the queasiness induced in me by the main character's twisted psychology, projected in the form of a demonic, sexually predatory Elvis, reassured me that I still have a soul.

What more could you want from a horror story?

Highly recommended.