Rating:

A Dark Comedy That Goes Way Too Far

Author: Jeff Strand

Ken’s wife thinks that he’s an alcoholic – and he lets her. It’s far better that she thinks he is at the bar at night instead of being in that other house, watching them die.

Recently, several brunettes have gone missing. One of these women is Gertie’s cousin, and the police don’t seem to be making any progress. They know there is a serial kidnapper, but they don’t know why he is capturing these women or what he is doing to them. Gertie decides to find out for herself, even if it kills her. Her new co-worker and outspoken lesbian friend, Charlene, is along for the ride, if only to keep Gertie from getting hurt or going too crazy. Nothing will ever be the same for either of them again.

I encountered Jeff Strand’s work through a Goodreads horror group and have been reading him ever since. My favorite of Strand’s books so far is Blister, which is a twisted yet amusing story, sardonic in all the best places, vengeful at all the right moments, unhinged like the best B-slasher with that bezerker battle haze offset by a few true moments of empathy and humanity. I enjoyed it so much that I broke down and bought the paperback after my first Kindle read because, heck, I want that in my library. And then I started reading more Strand, going beyond the book club. Enter My Pretties, an offering that is both too macabre and too forced to be truly engaging.

This is one of Strand’s most sickening ideas; our serial kidnapper, Ken, is your average Jo by day. At night he goes to a rented house and down the stairs to his special room where he watches women in cages hung from the ceiling slowly starve to death. He gives them water to prolong the suffering and then just sits on a chair, watching, waiting for the final moments of their deaths. It’s a disturbing premise, a little too demented and realistic to be comfortable. It would make for a fantastic, although too-dark-for-me horror novel, yet Strand takes the concept and tries to give it humor. This is the wrong time, wrong place. The subject matter is just too gruesome. The humor is forced, over the top, mostly encased in absurd dialogue and in the side-story of Ken’s wife, who has a few surprises of her own. It doesn’t work, not at all. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t like it.

As the story continues, circumstances and absurdity brings our killer into contact with Gertie and the smart-aleck Charlene, the two final girls who will get all the answers and end the reign of terror after some epic level trauma and more battle wounds than you would think a human could survive (this is where it transforms from horror to thriller.) By this time I was tired of the stilted humor (*spoiler alert* we have a family of psychopaths who want to bond over killing) and the contrasting darkness of a horrific concept. While Gertie and Charlene are likable characters, I wanted away from the world they inhabited. I wasn’t even especially interested in how they escaped. This was one of those books that left me wanting a break from my beloved horror genre. It just hit a bad note. This isn’t a subject for humor, and the over-trying for the absurd didn’t help dispel the endless depravity, the sickening images and thoughts. I just want boil my brain in bleach now. I still like Strand, and I’ll be back, but I need a break. Not his best.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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