Jamie Grefe

Vastly entertaining novella that reads as if an excitable pitch has got out of hand and steamrolls
into a full on rendition of the entire movie, with everyone listening either hyped up on the gloriously pumped enthusiasm of the tweaked screenplay style or trapped by the instant fix of day-glo 80s/90s cinema punk aesthetic rammed with small town hyper terrorvision. A creature is featured! A dolly mixture of sassy filthmeisters called The Skull Girls punk up to the type of backwoods town that show more has a gas station, a sheriff, and a dark stalking presence just waiting for a big reveal. Amid the promise of bloody carnage and practical effect grossness to come, the girls twirl as many one-liners as drum sticks. All is wildly familiar, with Grefe gleefully thieving the best trash horror aesthetics that will satisfy any nostalgia junkie or gore groupie. Fun to the max. show less

Okay, I'm just going to say it: Jaime Grefe needs to lay off the caffeine, or cocaine, or whatever he's on.

The Mondo Vixen Massacr is Jaime Grefe's entry into this year's New Bizarro Authors Series, a series I look forward to every year as it brings new and experimental voices in fiction. Grefe's entry is...unique, to say the least.

The book begins with Tom Clay being graphically tortured in every way you can possibly imagine and then some. Vixens of every type have broken into his house, show more murdered his son, kidnapped his wife, tortured Tom, and left him for dead. But he's not dead. Thus begins a bloody tale of rescue and revenge as he attempts to recover his wife from the vixens' clutches and maybe find out why they targeted him and his family to begin with.

The first thing that you'll notice is the writing style. Aside from just being graphically violent (Grefe shies away from nothing), the book is told in a stream-of-consciousness with constant action. Actually, it's more like reading the transcript for a high-energy pitch for an action movie, music cues and camera shots included. This is where things get interesting, both potentially good and bad, like a Schrödinger's novel. Before I get into that, I need to explain about the plot and characters.

The characters are there. They're well-drawn for their purpose, but not much beyond that and can be a bit shallow and two-dimensional. As for the plot, it's there although without a whole lot of mystery that isn't easy to solve. Now, I need to go back to my point in the last paragraph, because again this is not necessarily bad, depending on your point of view.

The way the plot and characters serve about as much purpose as in a porn movie. They're there mostly because the audience expects them to be, and they provide a reason to drive the action. But it's really the action that takes center stage. Grefe seems to have taken a similar approach in having the plot and characters there to drive the action, which is his main focus and clearly what he had enormous fun writing.

And there's the rub: If you're looking for non-stop action (the massacre really is nonstop from page one all the way to the end) and don't mind the plot and characters being more like decoration, figuratively and literally, then you will have a lot of fun reading this book. But if you require an in-depth plot, you will probably be disappointed. That being said, if you're looking for non-stop action, be careful what you wish for. You're going to need a lot of energy to keep up with Grefe.

The Mondo Vixen Massacre by Jaime Grefe earns 3.5 robo-vixens out of 5. show less