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The Slaughter King
A sadistic serial killer is leaving a seemingly random trail of butchered corpses, both male and female, across Europe. He kills and mutilates with the skill and anatomical precision of a surgeon, the flair of a surrealist painter, the insatiable ferocity of a beast. El Rey. The Slaughter King.
Author Simon Whitechapel has drawn inspiration for his story from the Greek Myth of the Calydonian Boar; transposing an ancient tale of hunting, betrayal and fatal consequences into the bleak urban landscape of the Serial Killer.
The Slaughter King pushes the boundaries of the modern crime novel, utilising scenes of graphic sex and violence to portray an amoral, annihilating universe as reflected in the mind of a remorseless slayer, and the inwardly collapsing society which tacitly permits his existence.
Author Simon Whitechapel has drawn inspiration for his story from the Greek Myth of the Calydonian Boar; transposing an ancient tale of hunting, betrayal and fatal consequences into the bleak urban landscape of the Serial Killer.
The Slaughter King pushes the boundaries of the modern crime novel, utilising scenes of graphic sex and violence to portray an amoral, annihilating universe as reflected in the mind of a remorseless slayer, and the inwardly collapsing society which tacitly permits his existence.
165 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 6, 2015
This book is such a curate's egg, I'm not sure where to begin...so I'll start at the beginning.
In the mid 90s I bought a so-so collection of HP Lovecraft tribute works published by Creation Press, which included a dark and disturbing short story by one Simon Whitechapel. It was memorable for many reasons, and for me was second only to the graphic adaptation of Lovecraft's 'Call of Cthulhu', which was worth the cover price alone. I'd spent some time searching for Whitechapel's novel on the back of this, and after a time gave up and forgot about it - 'til I stumbled across it on Amazon by accident. Of course, I grabbed it, and read it from cover to cover inside a single weekend.
I so wanted to like this.
In some ways I do - I could barely put it down once I'd started it.
In many ways I don't - I felt like I'd been had when I finally did put it down.
In negative terms, first up is the physical formatting. The book is not typeset normally, and everything is aligned hard left with no indents or regular paragraphing at all. Formatting of this sort would usually consign any new MS to the slush pile at any publishing house, so I'm not sure what Creation (strictly speaking, a joint production with their imprint Bad Blood and Headpress - the latter, I believe, still going strong and producing excellent underground and transgressive works) were up to with this one, especially following on from the beautiful interior design and layout of the 'Starry Wisdom'The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute To H.P. Lovecraft Lovecraft tribute. I don't know if this was corrected in subsequent printings (were there any?) but the text is also shot through with typographical errors and what look simply like common flaws in the editing process.
I'll also expand on the point raised by the US Amazon reviewer who denigrates the 'organised suicide' scene at the dinner party. Not only does it add nothing to the text, and seems to have been added as an afterthought, it is not even referred to outwith that chapter, and felt like an unwanted (and hideously overlong, and repetitive) intrusion into the main narrative. Also, an otherwise skinhead character is described as plaiting her hair at the chapter's opening, suggesting not only lousy proofreading but also that this really was a separate short story in its own right, concerning another character altogether, and was probably added at the last minute to fill the book out to novel length. Much of the book feels rushed, or incomplete. Huge swathes of repetitive description exist in some sections, maddeningly brief sketches in others. It has the feel of something that was either written to a deadline and didn't quite make it, or the writer gave up on before the end. It has the feel of a work in progress, or the texture of a work print of a movie. The whole police corruption subplot is never fully developed, another frustrating lose end left among many.
Much is made by other reviewers of the graphic scenes of slaughter, and deep anatomical references therein. I can't say I found them any more shocking or outrageous than what I'd been led to expect, and there's a good deal less of them than one might otherwise be led to believe from a book which comes pre-packaged with such fearsome press release text. The literary equivalent of 'Cannibal Holocaust' or 'Martyrs' it ain't. The ancient myth of the Calydonian Boar is referred to in the preface in an attempt by the author or editor to provide some modicum of highbrow literary and symbolic justification and reference point for what follows. I wish I could see the relevance, other than in some sketchy superficial similarities and the prevalent theme of Goddess-worship, and this aspect, again, feels like another clumsily-transplanted organ into what is already a shambling Frankensteinian creation, which seeks so hard to be the dark, monstrous eruption of the psychotic Id that the writer wishes it was. In truth, I wished for the same, for I love my horror, my myths, my symbolism, my doomed heroines and my dark, dark fiction. And I truly loved parts of this book, and equally detested others. Wearing my Editor's hat, I would love to sit down with SW and urge him to actually finish this work - to create the 'writer's cut', lousy pun intended - and actually reveal to us the book this ought to have been, the one I had wanted to read for years, and not the badly-assembled fragments of the book that is. As it stands. 'The Slaughter King' reads like the first draft of a first novel, in dire need of revision and editorial critique.
'El Rey' also seems to have almost slaughtered Whitechapel's own fiction writing career. He doesn't appear to have released anything since, barring a few quirky non-fiction works, though I'm pretty sure that the name is a pseudonym for one of Creation's own staff - as the similarly mysterious James Havoc was really one of the company's co-founders and commissioning editors.
It's a great shame that Creation Books and their imprints have gone belly-up lately. For a time, they turned out some of the most interesting and challenging genre writing I've ever come across, and made horror fiction seem truly dangerous and subversive again. On a personal note, it also means my own lesbian/BDSM/splatterpunk novel will need to find an alternative publisher now, too.
2 stars.
In the mid 90s I bought a so-so collection of HP Lovecraft tribute works published by Creation Press, which included a dark and disturbing short story by one Simon Whitechapel. It was memorable for many reasons, and for me was second only to the graphic adaptation of Lovecraft's 'Call of Cthulhu', which was worth the cover price alone. I'd spent some time searching for Whitechapel's novel on the back of this, and after a time gave up and forgot about it - 'til I stumbled across it on Amazon by accident. Of course, I grabbed it, and read it from cover to cover inside a single weekend.
I so wanted to like this.
In some ways I do - I could barely put it down once I'd started it.
In many ways I don't - I felt like I'd been had when I finally did put it down.
In negative terms, first up is the physical formatting. The book is not typeset normally, and everything is aligned hard left with no indents or regular paragraphing at all. Formatting of this sort would usually consign any new MS to the slush pile at any publishing house, so I'm not sure what Creation (strictly speaking, a joint production with their imprint Bad Blood and Headpress - the latter, I believe, still going strong and producing excellent underground and transgressive works) were up to with this one, especially following on from the beautiful interior design and layout of the 'Starry Wisdom'The Starry Wisdom: A Tribute To H.P. Lovecraft Lovecraft tribute. I don't know if this was corrected in subsequent printings (were there any?) but the text is also shot through with typographical errors and what look simply like common flaws in the editing process.
I'll also expand on the point raised by the US Amazon reviewer who denigrates the 'organised suicide' scene at the dinner party. Not only does it add nothing to the text, and seems to have been added as an afterthought, it is not even referred to outwith that chapter, and felt like an unwanted (and hideously overlong, and repetitive) intrusion into the main narrative. Also, an otherwise skinhead character is described as plaiting her hair at the chapter's opening, suggesting not only lousy proofreading but also that this really was a separate short story in its own right, concerning another character altogether, and was probably added at the last minute to fill the book out to novel length. Much of the book feels rushed, or incomplete. Huge swathes of repetitive description exist in some sections, maddeningly brief sketches in others. It has the feel of something that was either written to a deadline and didn't quite make it, or the writer gave up on before the end. It has the feel of a work in progress, or the texture of a work print of a movie. The whole police corruption subplot is never fully developed, another frustrating lose end left among many.
Much is made by other reviewers of the graphic scenes of slaughter, and deep anatomical references therein. I can't say I found them any more shocking or outrageous than what I'd been led to expect, and there's a good deal less of them than one might otherwise be led to believe from a book which comes pre-packaged with such fearsome press release text. The literary equivalent of 'Cannibal Holocaust' or 'Martyrs' it ain't. The ancient myth of the Calydonian Boar is referred to in the preface in an attempt by the author or editor to provide some modicum of highbrow literary and symbolic justification and reference point for what follows. I wish I could see the relevance, other than in some sketchy superficial similarities and the prevalent theme of Goddess-worship, and this aspect, again, feels like another clumsily-transplanted organ into what is already a shambling Frankensteinian creation, which seeks so hard to be the dark, monstrous eruption of the psychotic Id that the writer wishes it was. In truth, I wished for the same, for I love my horror, my myths, my symbolism, my doomed heroines and my dark, dark fiction. And I truly loved parts of this book, and equally detested others. Wearing my Editor's hat, I would love to sit down with SW and urge him to actually finish this work - to create the 'writer's cut', lousy pun intended - and actually reveal to us the book this ought to have been, the one I had wanted to read for years, and not the badly-assembled fragments of the book that is. As it stands. 'The Slaughter King' reads like the first draft of a first novel, in dire need of revision and editorial critique.
'El Rey' also seems to have almost slaughtered Whitechapel's own fiction writing career. He doesn't appear to have released anything since, barring a few quirky non-fiction works, though I'm pretty sure that the name is a pseudonym for one of Creation's own staff - as the similarly mysterious James Havoc was really one of the company's co-founders and commissioning editors.
It's a great shame that Creation Books and their imprints have gone belly-up lately. For a time, they turned out some of the most interesting and challenging genre writing I've ever come across, and made horror fiction seem truly dangerous and subversive again. On a personal note, it also means my own lesbian/BDSM/splatterpunk novel will need to find an alternative publisher now, too.
2 stars.
February 13, 2019
You want dark? This is dark. No murd'rer ever
Had such precision anatomical.
He knows the nature of blood vessels he
So coldly violates, down to the last
Tiny capillary. And Oh! how clear,
Precise and unjudgemental is the prose!
Do not read this if you seek reassurance,
Nor yet vicarious thrills; permitted not
Is adolescent identification
With murderer. No, this presents to mind
Of one entirely deadly with the chill
Unflinching gaze of microscope. Dark, Dark...
Dark dark dark dark dark dark dark dark dark dark...
You wouldn't believe how bleedin' dark this is.
Had such precision anatomical.
He knows the nature of blood vessels he
So coldly violates, down to the last
Tiny capillary. And Oh! how clear,
Precise and unjudgemental is the prose!
Do not read this if you seek reassurance,
Nor yet vicarious thrills; permitted not
Is adolescent identification
With murderer. No, this presents to mind
Of one entirely deadly with the chill
Unflinching gaze of microscope. Dark, Dark...
Dark dark dark dark dark dark dark dark dark dark...
You wouldn't believe how bleedin' dark this is.
May 20, 2025
idk who recommended this to me but it was not good. purple rose bohemian 90s nonsense.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews