The Bighead : Author's Preferred Version
by Edward Lee, Erik Wilson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Edward Lee, Erik WilsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-02-01
ISBN: 1892950138
Number of pages: 360
Publisher: Overlook Connection Press
Book Reviews of The Bighead : Author's Preferred Version
Book Review: Feeble geek show...
Summary: 1 Stars
Having read a couple of synopses for this it sounded like a good cheap thrill ride along the lines of a Jack Ketchum or Richard Laymon. And that's the intent, at least thematically. A balls-out visceral backwoods horror story sounds pretty good though, right? It's been done before, certainly, but with some great results (notably Ketchum's Off Season and its sequel Offspring and Laymon's Dark Mountain, etc) so I was looking forward to getting this one.
Let me save you some money Amazon shopper. What we have here is the single worst excuse for a horror novel I have ever read (and I've read some stinkers). Early on it becomes apparent that the author is a fan of gross-out violence, often heavily sexualised. Okay, fair enough, you shocked me. There follows scene after scene, page after page, chapter after tedious chapter of the same 'offensive' puerile approach, an approach that reached overkill early on and then kept going repetitively without doing anything really transgressive like shoehorning a halfway serviceable plot into the proceedings.
Now some might consider the above a recommendation. I myself was intrigued by references to how 'obscene' and bloody 'The Bighead' really was. The problem is that gore and obscenity are fine if you have a point to make or can craft a story more convincingly than a seven year-old child. What a Ketchum or Laymon might have moulded into a gut-wrenching grand guignol tale here reads like the crayon-scrawled masturbatory fantasies of Henry Lee Lucas.
Among the book's many glaring flaws are its cast of wholly unlikeable characters, weak comedy hillybilly dialogue and the THREE hilariously bad 'twists' in the book's final stretch. Trust me, you will be shocked. But only at the fact that the novel's original editor only found ONE of these twists too moronic to publish in its original printing.
In summary, then? Unpleasant but boring with it. Badly written, though some of the rural detail is quite evocatively described. Above all though, this has all been done so much better years ago and 'The Bighead' comes across as a real evolutionary throwback for the contemporary horror novel, lacking sophistication in theme or approach. In fact in that sense it's a great deal like its titular monstrosity, the Bighead hisself...drooling, frenzied and with special needs.
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