Scary Bastard

Have you ever watched backyard wrestling? You know, the one where normal, ordinary people – some malnourished – throw themselves through fluorescent light tubes, tables, boards, windows? These “wrestlers” tend to become five-second stars to the neighborhood crowds of ten to twenty spectators with a plethora of blood, guts, and senseless violence. It's pedestrian. It's crass. But, don't get me wrong, there's an entire televised enterprise called AEW, backed by corporate advertising and Time Warner, that competes with WWE by using paid pro-wrestling professionals to perform backyard wrestling barbarism. There's a crowd for it, no doubt.

Aron Beauregard is like a backyard wrestler. But, not really a wrestler. He's a horror writer. He writes extremely violent novels and shorts that feature disposable characters being tortured, raped, and killed. He's authored over 20 novels, including Horsefly (2026), Cemetery Camp (2023), and Playground (2022). His short story collection, Came with the Frame (2023), features a few characters that appear in his 2019 novel Ugly Bastard. I've enjoyed some – not all - of the novels by splatter-horror experts like Brian Berry and Bryan Smith. I decided to borrow a friend's trade paperback of Scary Bastard and give it a go. It was published by Maggot Press with artwork by both Anton Rosovsky and Andrly Dankovych. 

While there isn't really a protagonist, the main content of the novel features scenes involving a super-slasher Hulk thing named Edmon. In the book's beginning, Edmon is a serial killer imprisoned at a sanitarium. He doesn't speak, and reminds me of Rob Zombie's version of adult Michael Myers in the Halloween re-imagining. With the help of a serial rapist and killer, Herschel, Edmon escapes the facility and goes on a killing spree on Halloween night. That's pretty much it.

Beauregard adds copious amounts of ridiculous graphic sex, limb-tearing, skinning, decapitating, rape, animal abuse, kid deaths, and other literary atrocities that make you wonder why this guy is freely walking among civilization. It is disgusting, completely unnecessary, and thinly constructed. An author once said that if you’ve ever had sex, you can pretty much write p*** novels. I think the same thing goes here. If you've watched one flesh-tearing horror movie, you can write the torture p-word stuff just fine. The question is how depraved the reader must be to really enjoy this kind of thing. I read it, skipped quite a bit of the gore, and was left...with very little else. In my opinion, pass on this one.