This review will contain spoilers of the entire story, and with this I provide a huge trigger warning: this book and review discusses rape, foeticide, mutilation, necrophilia, misogyny and homophobia. Read both the book and/or this review at your own discretion.
I came into this book with a sense of optimism, really. Wanting to immerse myself in more splatterpunk lit, I took to checking what other people recommended, and one of them was The Slob. Having read the premise and been intrigued, I read this in hopes of something good.
Needless to say, I found myself deeply disappointed.
I would genuinely love to know what it is people loved about this book, because personally, I kind of felt a bit lied to. In this review I plan to elaborate on my personal thoughts and gripes.
To summarise for those who do not intend upon reading the full thing:
Vera is a woman who grew to become obsessed with cleanliness after growing up in deeply unhygienic circumstances and having to clean up what remained of her mentally ill sister after her suicide. Later marrying a now-disabled veteran named Daniel, she picks up on becoming a door-to-door vacuum saleswoman in order to rake in extra money in hopes of supporting her pregnancy.
When knocking at the door of The Slob, she finds herself locked in and enduring copious bouts of physical and sexual torture. This includes being sexually assaulted using a piece of cooked human meat, being forced to eat that after, having her unborn infant pulverised and being force fed to her, and so forth.
The book ends after Vera escapes her cage in the barn she got locked up in and kills The Slob (he only gets called this, by the way) by pushing him into a massive meatgrinder which was used to grind down previous victims into a fine minced meat. It later turns out that this meat (cleverly labelled “Tender Young Girl”) gets used by a cult of gay men who believe that through eating this meat, they can “whittle down the feminine populace around them while, at the same time, pocketing some of their lady-like qualities” (these are the author’s words, not mine). So that they have a chance, or something…? I don't know how they managed to shoehorn homophobia into this all, but somehow they did.
Also, Vera now turns out to be pregnant with The Slob’s child.
Positives
I don’t wish to start on a negative note, however, as there are good things I can list about this book. Namely, the premise itself. I came into this intrigued, as the main story left me wondering what sort of horrors would unfold. Additionally, this book is an easy read - perhaps not from a content standpoint, but from a literary one - and one that I blazed through in an afternoon.
Thus, I will give credit where credit is due: Beauregard does know how to make you want to keep reading, at least in my opinion. The main driving point for this book is that you keep reading on the basis of “But what happens next?”, and despite later complaints about characterisation, Vera is a character successfully written in a way that makes you root for her and want to escape the madness she endures. The strongest parts in this regard, to me, was Vera’s cooperation with Sandra. Despite my nagging feeling that it wouldn’t end well, I found myself still hoping that their plan would work, thus being a motivation for me to keep reading.
Additionally - and this perhaps is besides the point as this isn’t about the writing itself - I’d like to note that I thoroughly enjoy the cover art.
Unfortunately, though, that’s about all the good things I have to say.
Plot buildup
Because I have a lot to say in regards to the negatives of this book, it will be divided into several subsections, starting with the story’s buildup.
You get a taste of what’s to come in the first ‘chapter’, but after that, almost half of the book is spent just explaining things. You have heard of the concept “show, don’t tell”. Well, there’s a whole lot of telling and little to no showing.
I don’t consider this to be a massive crime when it comes to explaining Vera’s upbringing and the suicide of her sister, as this feels authentic to the feeling of having somebody recount their life to you. What in my opinion, however, was fully unnecessary was the detailed interjection of how Vera met her husband, Daniel. The fact that this infodump was placed between the scene in which Vera meets the vacuum salesman and her decision to join in on selling vacuums herself is disorienting and in the grand scheme of the story, rather irrelevant.
I could've been less mad about this had it been inserted at a better moment, as I can understand the decision to add a little bit of exposition about Daniel and his importance to Vera’s mental wellbeing. However, the timing in which this additional information was added feels deeply off to the point where when you snap back to the ‘present’, it feels disorienting. The fact that their romance felt incredibly corny didn't help either.
By the time the horror actually starts, it’s like taking a fast train towards the end, and I don’t mean this in a good way considering how slow the first half of the book felt to me. Sure, the first few days get thoroughly detailed, thus giving you the ability to immerse yourself somewhat properly. After the escape attempt, however, we simply timeskip a few weeks, once again just being told that Vera endures bouts of agony in the process. This jump, in my opinion, left an undesirable gap in time which I feel should have been explored and could have been used to further drive us deeper into the horrors of being held captive by The Slob.
This further makes me want to elaborate on my gripes with the depictions of violence in the book. I am not at all bothered by the sheer extremity of the brutality to be found, but rather disappointed by the way that the violence fails to build up upon itself. To give you an example of this done right, have a look at A Serbian Film: despite scenes in it being really bad, as you continue to watch you still continue to get shocked and think “Wow, somehow it just keeps getting worse!”. This is what one should strive for in my opinion, and The Slob fully failed at creating that “God, it keeps getting worse” feeling.
Summarised: The fundamental problem with the buildup of this story is that we begin excruciatingly slow and hone in on irrelevant points, and by the time we get into the real meat (no pun intended) of things, it feels quick and shallow, even the violence - the selling point of this book - feeling substanceless.
(A lack of) Character development
This in my opinion is one of the things that angers me the most about this book as I think about it more. The potential was ripe for picking, and I cannot tell whether I as a reader am purposefully being taunted or if Beauregard simply gave up on trying with characterisation the moment he got into writing the actual violence.
We spent half the book reading about Vera’s filth-related trauma, and for what? For her to be reduced to an immortal punching bag to be violated and vomited on?
The start of Vera’s previous characterisation being fully diminished starts at the very moment she knocks at The Slob’s door. With her obsession with cleanliness having previously been established as to keep memories of her sister’s suicide at bay, would she not immediately have been on edge the moment she had a glimpse of the state of The Slob’s home? You cannot look me in the eye and tell me that at any point, Vera would have voluntarily stepped in there knowing what we previously learned about her as a character.
Additionally, as she gets locked up in the absolute filth, we barely get to know about how this affects Vera, if at all. Does the filth not bring back bad memories? Does it not take her back to her filthy, unhygienic childhood home? Does it not distress her?
Vera’s unborn infant was brutally killed and force fed to her, and this fact only occasionally gets acknowledged in the story despite how absolutely devastating this would realistically be for a to-be mother. Only once do I remember being shown a semblance of grief on Vera’s part, and how these events affect her psyche rarely gets explored.
With the way the book’s synopsis was written, I went into this thinking that part of this book would be Vera being forced to confront the traumatic childhood that she has spent the entirety of her adolescent and adult life attempting to clean away. I did not get any of this in the slightest and all potential for character exploration in the second half of this book was thrown away in favour of frivolously describing anatomically impossible violence. This leads us to the following:
Hey, Aron. Women don’t really work that way (and other weird anatomical hijinks)
Another deeply bothersome constant within this book is an onslaught of anatomical inaccuracies, especially related to female anatomy.
These include:
- Being able to reach elbow-deep into Vera’s vagina to pull out chunks of her unborn infant
- Being able to vacuum out chunk of Vera’s unborn infant through her vagina
- Vera being able to shove a sharp chunk of forearm bone into her vagina without injury
- The forearm bone being able to slice up The Slob’s penis upon him trying to rape her
- Sandra being able to speak perfectly understandable English despite missing her lips
- "female stash spot" ?????????
Mind you, these are the things that I could list off the top of my head alone. I would be able to tolerate the occasional implausibility considering it’s rather difficult to gauge realism when you plan on getting creative with writing torture, but things like what I have listed above not only make it difficult to suspend disbelief: it also makes it hard to take the story seriously.
Speaking of things I thought were hard to take seriously:
“The banana split covered in cherry” (Alt. Subtitle: what the fuck is this book’s prose)
This one’s a bit of a more difficult one to discuss for me because I am aware that opinions on prose in literature can vary quite wildly. My opinion in the matter is that in better cases it’s clunky to read, and at worst flatout goofy.
However, I will let this subtitle do the majority of the talking here. This was a legitimate description used for The Slob’s cut up penis.
Thankfully, despite the silliness of the writing at times, Beauregard’s prose is not offensive to the point you want to DNF solely on that basis. However, be warned: while I can understand that perhaps beautiful wording isn’t the thing one would be looking for when reading The Slob, I personally do not have many good things to say about it. Be prepared for writing that makes you roll your eyes and on some occasions makes you wonder: “What was the need to say it that way?” (example: see this section’s title).
Conclusion
Overall, I came in looking for good horror and came out feeling like I perhaps wasted my afternoon. Throughout the entirety of reading, throughout the spelling errors end odd word choices (“brazed babes” to describe the minced cooked flesh of The Slob’s victims??? Yes, it was misspelled in the book) and throughout the corniness that was the last quarter of this book, the only question that persisted within me was “What was all of this for?”.
Let me reinstate: I am a solemn defender of extreme horror and the creation of it. I fully knew to expect true shock when reading this, but in my opinion, this book didn’t even do a good job of achieving its very purpose (which, again, was to shock and disturb). Thus, when it doesn’t even make for proper ‘shock horror’ (as some may call it), I once again need to wonder: What was all of this for?
After all, clearly it didn’t shock, disturb or horrify me adequately, nor can this be justified by the book giving way for character exposition or depth. After all, depth is one of the many things The Slob is sorely lacking in.
It’s a bad attempt at extreme horror, a bad attempt at writing something deeper and a bad attempt at writing overall. I wanted to give this book two stars for the positives that I had previously listed. However, the more I sat down to gather my thoughts, the more I realised just how much I truly disliked this work.
Do yourself a favour. Watch Cannibal Holocaust instead.