Depraved, by Bryan Smith

I've known Bryan Smith for a long time. From the message boards, not real life. He always seemed like a kindred spirit to me. A beer-loving horror fanatic. A guy I'd like to hang out with. But, sadly, good guys aren't always good writers.

I bought Bryan's first novel from Leisure, House of Blood. I understood that it was the kind of book that fans of Edward Lee and classic exploitation movies would love. I started it almost immediately, and...

I didn't like it. At all. It gives me no pleasure to say that. I thought that there was a good book there in House of Blood, but it needed work. A skilled editorial overhaul, perhaps. Of course, this is only my personal opinion. I know others that liked House of Blood a lot.

I always intended to give Bryan's work another try, but I never got around to doing it. Until now. I've been hearing a lot of wild praise for Depraved and I figured that it was high time to check out Bryan Smith once again.

I read Depraved in a feverish day or two. My impression?

Holy.

Shit.

Depraved is an amazing novel. It's hard. Hard as just about anything I've ever read. I'm talking a rival to The Bighead. But extreme situations and endless over-the-top scenes of sex and violence do not a good book make. When a writer attempts to substitute character and story for saturated grue, I get bored. It takes a powerful storyteller to be able to shock and delight his or her readers with explicit material and also tell a breakneck story. I'm thinking along the lines of Philip Jose Farmer's Image of the Beast, which is the Father of the Extreme Horror Novels. Or the best work of Edward Lee. Jack Ketchum. Richard Laymon.

Bryan Smith has taken a fairly large group of characters and fleshed them out as human beings. Well, they're human at the beginning, but by the end they are something less than human. Or more than human, depending on your own personal perspective.

In one sense Depraved is an exercise into the depths of what the human being can endure in order to survive. And what happens to the person after they've committed atrocities in the name of survival.

In another sense Depraved is a balls-out, wild roller coaster ride of a horror story that stands among the best of the best in the extreme horror subgenre.

Yes, I loved Depraved, but I'd really like to see Bryan show some restraint in the future. After a while piles of entrails and endless scenes of increasingly bizarre sex grow repetitive. Since House of Blood, Bryan has shown enormous growth as a writer. He has developed a voice that carries the lurid events of Depraved in clear, effective prose. I'd just like to see him tone down the excess someday.

However, if he keeps writing hardcore books as good as Depraved, I'll keep buying them. I'm not quite ready to take the crown of Hardcore Horror King off of Edward Lee and put in on Bryan Smyth's head, but if his next book, The Killing Kind, is even more extreme than Depraved is (as I've heard), I may not have a choice.