Review: Sick Bastards

Sick Bastards by Matt Shaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

**WARNING: This novel and this review contain disturbing content, including descriptions of explicit sex and depraved behavior. Please do not continue reading if you are offended or take issue with these topics. You’ve been warned. **







“I positioned myself on top of her and pushed in again....so wet and yet incredibly tight... I put my hand around her neck and squeezed hard—cutting off her air as she liked...

A knock on the door distracted us both. Before we’d a chance to hide ourselves, the door opened a crack and Mother stuck her head through. ‘I’ve been calling you for hours,’ she moaned. ‘Put your sister down! Dinner’s ready.’”

This is the incredibly disturbing scene that opens the novel Sick Bastards, one of the most depraved pieces I’ve ever read. If the book relied solely on shock value, I may have put it down and brushed my teeth to get rid of the bile that kept creeping up. Instead, there is actually a plot here that was pretty damn engaging once I got past my “OMG” moments.

The premise is that a “family” of four (the narrator and those referred to generically as Mother, Father and Sister) survives what they believe to be a nuclear attack. Nothing from before the event, including their own memories, exists except for a photo of the little family in what appears to be happier times. Together they stumble upon a house in the woods that was apparently abandoned by the previous tenants. They take up residence in the structure, living day to day scavenging for food, staying indoors to avoid the hellish creatures that dwell in the darkness. When the narrator, eventually identified as John, decides to strike out on his own in an effort to save himself and his family, the boundaries that define morality continue to disintegrate into tiny pieces that leave the reader aghast and nauseous.

The entire read is nightmarish and offers the reader a front row seat to an unveiling of the author’s twisted imagination. The details are myriad and specific, the shock value of which ratchets up with every page.

“My thumbs were the worst: blood, dark clotted gore and brains. I gave them a lick clean...”

Just when the reader is sure things can’t possibly get any more horrifying, the entire shit-show is suddenly illuminated by an entirely different spotlight—one that warps one’s perspective and calls into question everything believed to be just.

In spite of my visceral reactions to the incest, cannibalism and more, or perhaps BECAUSE of these reactions, I have to give props to Shaw. He was able to keep me turning pages even while I felt like vomiting. There’s something to be said for that, though I’m not sure what it is, or whether it reflects more upon me or the book itself—and that is probably the most stomach-churning twist of them all.

I won’t be looking to read anything else by this author, but four stars for the balls Shaw had to actually push this through publication. I can only imagine the hate mail.

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