Just in time to scare you silly this Halloween, Sayville native and short story horror writer John Collins has penned a horror-able novella, The Leeds Point Horror. The title is derived from a legendary creature that is part of the lore of Leeds Point, a locale in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.
Collins’ devotion to the gruesome goes back to when he was a mere 3-year-old, and his folks brought him along to a local drive-in. Thinking he was asleep in the back seat, they settled in to watch one of the most chilling movies of all time. But not only was John awake; he was watching—and loving Jaws, the now-classic horror film. Stir in a grandmother regaling him with tales of intrigue and danger; add a generous helping of TV’s classic horror movies (an outsider as a youngster, he identified with the otherness of monsters), and you’ve got a hardcore writer of the macabre.
Author Collins gets right to it with Aaron Transom’s cautioning voice. At once telling and eerie: “His eyes adapted to the dark, seeing the crisscrossing threads of the fine gossamer material with perfect clarity, watching small waves run down the fabric like the tide of a dark ocean, knowing that predators lingered under the surface.”
Transom speaks of spirits, summoning, and sacrifice at the Transom Brothers Autumn Carnival. There, Lisa and her boyfriend, Jason, have taken her two younger brothers, Tommy and Michael, out for a fun night.
Lisa is getting bad vibes. There’s something off kilter here. The sketchy individuals who seem to be running the show don’t appear to be actors. And the rides that “…growl like shackled beasts. The noxious stink from the engines’ exhaust.”
The author effectively changes voices. Now we’re in Lisa’s head, worrying where her brothers have gone. Now, thinking like creatures of the night, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the “Feast of Japheth” – believe me, it’s not franks and fries. More a ritual of blood and power. A “flash of yellowed, sharpened teeth shooting out like a barracuda… teeth grinding into tendons and muscle, shredding the tissue into red ribbons… spitting out meat before diving back for more.” This is horror, people, and the ghouls are in it to win!
So, if it’s gore you’ve come looking for, you’ve come to the right spook house.
There’s tearing flesh and feasting on entrails, aplenty. This is horror writing that harks back to splatterpunk, a term coined in 1986 by David J. Schow at the World Fantasy Convention. It aims to terrify readers using graphic violence, and Collins does it well.
In a chilling ending scene in the Leads Point Horror’s tent, the evil Aaron Transom meets up with Lisa, who is all but done in from the preceding chaos. And then, the “bizarre pattern” on his chest triggers a “tightness in her skull… a mounting pressure behind her frontal lobes as she fell to her knees, vomiting from the onset of disorientation.”
But the young woman rallies and goes head-to-head with the evil one. The floor is slick with the blood of carnage, and they battle to the end, which leaves me wondering: under all the gore and gruesome horror writing, does there beat the heart of a feminist?
Perhaps it’s part of the genre, but I would have liked more backstory about Lisa and her brothers. Collins relates that their father bullied them, and the quote “…hurt her more than his fists ever could” is dropped without further explanation. There were also distracting typos and inconsistent spelling of names, as well as lapses in grammar and tense, and repetitive descriptions that some careful editing would have caught.
