Customer Reviews

Flesh Gothic

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Let me preface my review by saying I am not a big fan of Edward Lee. Not because he's a poor writer, or has no ear for word flow, but just because I'm not a fan of his over-the-top style of writing. In some of his books I've read, too often I've found the plots left unattended to so he could focus on his proclivity for tons of lust, sex, violence, and death. This can be interesting reading when interweaved with interesting plot elements (like in some of Robert Laymon's more graphic works) but just in my opinion I tend to find it too repetitive, uninteresting, and schlocky.

Now. That said, I came across this book, "Flesh Gothic," and read the description, and decided to give it a try. I really like finding books that have a classic horror setup, I tend to like a well-written, entertaining, classic horror novel than one that sets out to spin the genre on its head and revolutionize everything while lacking a little in the raw entertainment end of it (like House of Leaves). "Flesh Gothic" promises that, and delivers.

"Flesh Gothic" has a setup *very* much like Richard Matheson's classic horror novel "Hell House." A 66 room haunted mansion that is the site of unbelievable depravity, with all the participants dead, except one, seemingly becomes the focus of a team investigators. Very much like Matheson's "Hell House," a fantastic novel. It has a wonderful setup that immediately got me very interested and involved with the novel, and it contains a number of classic haunted house mysteries that beg discover.

A ways into the novel, however, it takes more of a fantastical turn reminscent of the author's "City Infernal." While initially I wasn't that thrilled about the turn it took, as the book continued, it seemed in some way to mesh well with the beginning of the book after all. This is not "Hell House Redux," although it may start out that way. As the investigators explore the house, it becomes less standard horror than "Hell House," and more of, like I said, a surrealistic and sick tour de force of nightmarish imagery. However, it still stays true to classic horror in many ways.

To wrap this up, I would recommend this book. I'm not a big Edward Lee fan, but I enjoyed this novel. It was naughtily depraved like Lee always is, but not unbearably or boringly so. Lee doesn't cheat you on the ending, and he makes the most and expands upon a great formula. 4 stars, give it a read.

In Florida there is a mansion of 66 rooms. It has had a long history of sexual depravity. Recently an orgy turned into a slaughter as guests were killed and dismembered in ritualistic fashion. Afterwards the owner was missing and presumed dead. Now his widow is sending a team of psychics and a writer into the house to determine just what happened.

Very strong imagery is used to tie psychic and sexual ideas together. The characters delve into the darkness of the house while fighting rising lusts that seem to be fed by the house itself. A strange girl, a locked safe, disappearing bodies, abandoned cars, and more drive the plot forward to its horrible conclusion.

Like many Edward Lee books, this one is not for the squeamish or faint of heart. The images of sex and violence are strong and far from vanilla mainstream. The plot was interesting as were the characters but it is definitely only for fans of Lee's style of brutal writing.

Edward Lee takes a turn at the old "psychic investigators loose in the world's most haunted house" tale and delivers a devastating, wonderfully dark novel as only he can.

After weeks of depravity, orgies, and murder, a Florida mansion is finally broken into by authorities for them only to find that the wealthy owner of the place has vanished leaving bloodshed in his wake. Presumed dead, his widow now hires a disparate group of investigators, psychics, empaths, and a recovering alcoholic writer to enter the house and see if they can make contact with any of the forces presumed to lurk there.

Lee pulls out all the stops when it comes to sexual, spiritual, and psychic desires and energy. Crafting a tale where the powers that be draw in the team as well as anybody else unlucky enough to be anywhere near the premises, Lee gives us a very solid mystery among all the slaughter. he's done his research when it comes to psychic investigations and the beliefs therein.

Stylish, hardcore, terrifying, and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, FLESH GOTHIC is probably Lee's best novel to date. It works on all cylinders, and will draw you into its bizarre and fantastic realms as surely as the guests are drawn into the dark heart of the house itself.

Okay i love Ed Lee, but the man is OBSESSED with PENISES! Im talking big ones, small ones, Sentient ones that walk around with perpetual woodies, he gives a shout out to other body parts a ton, but the pendulous extremeties are always his Bone du jour. I love his novels, as sick and twisted as they all are, i like the escape and the macabre window into perversity i gain from them.

Flesh Gothic reminds me of the Clive Barker story "Down Satan", where a rich man wants to bring Satan to earth so that God will save him. He sets up a temple and murders and tortures people waiting for the devil. In Flesh Gothic, the rich man is slightly more perverted, and wants to summon the Demon of Lust to earth for some unholy purpose. He uses substantially the same process, with the cruel torture of women, in a satanic orgy to open the gateway to hell. After the 13 murders, a group of psychics and other masters of the paranormal are hired by the rich man's widow to investigate what happened that night. To discover why her husbands body was not among the corpses littered throughout the house, and why he hasn't been seen since. The only survivor is a fat, insane, crack addict girl who cannot communicate from the horrors she endured.
This book is extremely graphic in its depictions of sex and violence, and should not be read by the faint of heart. However, if you dare to read it, you will be enthralled by the mystery, and tension that builds up as the psychics begin to discover the terrible truth.


Relic113

I have read horror novels for close to thirty years. I have enjoyed works by King, Straub, McCammon, Herbert, Matheson and others too numerous to mention. I bring this up because I sense some "horror elitism" in a few of the bad reviews for Edward Lee's "Flesh Gothic" which is a cracking good haunted house novel despite many graphic scenes that enhance, rather than take away from the plot.

Mr. Lee's prose is lean, spare and he moves the plot along at a quick pace that still takes the time for character development, something that is lacking in recent horror. To synopsize, the "widow" of a billionaire businessman/porn peddler hires a team of psychics, an exorcist and a writer to investigate Hildreth House, a 66 room mansion in which a dreadful massacre occurred. The wife does not believe that the husband is dead, and explains that her husband dabbled in porn as a means to achieve his true interest in life, that of a satanist.

Anyway, numerous plot turns, psychic jargon and phenomena are introduced and the house lives up to it's nasty reputation. Mr. Lee doesn't pull punches, he just doesn't state that the house is awful and evil and blithely go in another direction. Mr. Lee rubs the readers face into the scenes that prove why the house is evil and although some scenes are too pornographic for popular taste, they actually enhance the plot by forcing the reader to realize, along with his characters, the immensity of the evil that they are facing in the house.

A much gorier, nastier version of Richard Matheson's seminal Haunted House novel "Hell House". Any reader who enjoyed "Hell House", "Ghost Story", "The Shining" and "The Survivor" will enjoy Edward Lee. However, "Flesh Gothic" is not for those who favor "psychological" horror.

On April 3rd, in a mansion tucked away in the woods in a small Florida town, twenty-seven people were slaughtered in anticipation of some unknown event yet to come. Twenty-six of those bodies were recovered. The man behind the massacre was Reginald Hidlreth. Two weeks later, his wife Vivica hires a team of psychics, a demonologist, and a reporter, to enter the house and find out, not only what happened to her husband--his body was never recovered and it's unknown whether he's alive or dead--but more importantly, what was he planning and when was it was supposed to take place?

Wow, a story about a team of investigators going into the big haunted mansion? Never read a story like that before. Well, except for Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House". Oh, and Richard Mattheson's "Hell House." Considering the mansion in Ed Lee's "Flesh Gothic" is the Hildreth Mansion, you think it's got something to do with the letter H in all those house names?

Anyway. The second I realized what was going on, that's when I really started enjoying this story. Because I knew that if the idea was such a well-known one, and he was doing it anyway, Ed Lee must have something special in mind. And he did. "Flesh Gothic" is anything but a typical "group of people in the haunted house" story. This isn't some standard evil ghost we're dealing with in this place. This is Belarius, Lucifer's first servant in Hell. That's quite a step up from the plots we're used to.

When Reginald Hildreth bought the mansion, he turned it into a porn studio for his business T&T Enterprises. They used the mansion for their locations, and the stars used it as their home. On the night of April 3rd, all of them were killed, their blood drained into buckets, and the walls were then painted red. This was done in sacrifice to Belarius, so he would open the Rive and let Hildreth enter the Chirice Flaesc. Two weeks later, Hildreth's "widow" Vivaca hires the team of experts to go into the house and find out what happened.

She brings in Adrianne, a remote viewer, Cathleen, a clairvoyant, medium, and telekinetic, Willis, a tactionist, Nyvysk, ex-priest, demonologist, and exorcist, and Westmore, a freelance reporter. Also present to keep an eye on things are Karen and Mack, ex-T&T employees.

The group sets up their equipment and begins exploring the house. Immediately, the psychics are bombarded with horrible images. Willis sees something in one of the rooms that's so horrifying he's almost paralyzed with it. Karen, Cathleen and Adrianne are raped. Not by ghosts, everyone agrees, but by revenants, soulless spirits, Adiposians, created from rendered fat in the Chirice Flaesc. Nyvysk is confronted by a spirit from his own past. The only one who seems immune to the effects of the house is Westmore, an ex-alcoholic who doesn't believe in psychics and spirits, but who's there to do a job for Vivica Hildreth.

Watching from his car, parked in the woods outside the mansion, is Clements, an ex-cop who was hired to find out what happened to Debbie Rodenbaugh, the only person in the house on the night of April 3rd whose body was never found. As Westmore's investigations inside the house lead him closer to the secret of that night, he and Clements might have more in common than you'd think as Debbie Rodenbaugh just might be the key to what happened, or what's gong to happen.

This is a book that keeps its secrets close and hides them well until it's ready to reveal them. Almost any other writer out there, if given this old standard to work with, would have gone in much the same tired direction as everyone else and produced a very poor Shirley Jackson or Richard Mattheson copy. But as we've seen from his previous novels, Ed Lee's not any other writer and he's not going to be satisfied with just another haunted house investigation story. In fact, the real story here isn't even so much about the house as it is about Reginald Hildreth and what he had planned on that night of April 3rd--and what he still has planned, because April 3rd was only the beginning, and unbeknownst to the team inside the house, that plan is still in motion.

I really liked the way Lee drew these characters, letting us meet each of them individually (except Adrianne and Cathleen, whom we meet on a plane together on their way to the mansion--but it's just the two of them, so we're still able to get to know them individually before they're thrust into the group environment), and we're allowed to see their lives, where they're coming from and how they got to this point. He's got such a knack for characters, creating these fully formed, three-dimensional people whom he can then throw into these incredibly vile situations and see how they react. I love that about his work.

I also liked the backstory. So far this year I've read four novels in which some aspect of the heaven/hell mythology is rewritten and expanded on. First in Adrienne Jones's upcoming novels "The Hoax" and "Oral Vices", then in Ed Lee's "The Messenger" and now "Flesh Gothic". If these two writers knew each other, I'd wonder if this was some plan they had, but they don't, so it must be coincidence.

There was only one problem with "Flesh Gothic", as far as I could see, and that's this: once they begin to realize that things inside the house are real--all three women are raped at different times, Nyvysk uses his equipment to verify the house is, in "expert" talk, "charged"--they continue to search the house alone. After being raped once already, both Adrianne and Cathleen still insist on venturing throughout the house by themselves. They know what happened there, it's all in the police report, but they don't really seem too affected by it. If I'm in a house in which twenty-six bodies were chopped to pieces, and three women tell me they were raped by some unseen force, you can bet I'm not going too awful far away from where everyone else is.

But they're supposed to be old pros at what they do, so in their world, maybe it's not so outlandish. I wouldn't do it, though.

When I first started reading Ed Lee, it was one hardcore story after another, one step deeper into the depravity well. The thing was, he was GOOD at it. The sickness in his stories always somehow came about as part of the plot, they never seemed tossed in their for shock value, which is how just about every other story of that type comes off. But in the past couple years, I've come to see that he's not just a shock writer, that's just something he does for a very specific audience. But when he's writing for the general public, he's even more engaging. And his prose flies by. I started this book on a Sunday, and I'd reached page 80 before lunch. I never read anything that fast, but Lee kept my eyes on the page and never once gave me a moment to look up and check the clock, or look ahead and see how many pages were left of that chapter. He grabbed me in the beginning and kept me there from page one. There's not a lot of writers who can do that, but Ed Lee seems to do it over and over. I don't mind. With all the crappy writing out there from authors who should know better, thank God someone can.

Just when I thought haunted houses had been done to death, Edward Lee throws in so many new turns, twists, and horrors, I couldn't believe it. The paranormal investigators in this book are totally unique, not overdone or done before, and there's no shortage of the heavy eroticism and well-crafted gore that Lee does better than anyone else. The horror never stops from the first page to the last, and this book's probably got the best shock ending of the year. Highly recommended.

The novel has it all: huge, gaping plot holes, a slew of unsympathetic characters, an ending that makes no sense, and all the gore and sexual deviancy of a group of teenagers playing "what's grosser than gross".

It seems like Edward Lee was writing this thing in spurts, because some sections seem decent and then he lapses into fits of writing complete [...].

The plot is basically this; a crazy billionare has an insane [...] in culminates in opening a portal to hell and pretty much everyone in attendance dying. A group of investigators and psychics get dispatched to find out what happened and in the course, they find out that the area is really disturbed and that hell on earth is about to begin, etc. etc.

When they kick of the introduction of the psychics, the dialogue between the psychics is pretty believable. Unfortunately, they're speaking in ESP jargon which means jack-squat to anyone else. And it's not until chapters later when we find out just what the hell any of their wacky acronyms mean.

Then when they get to setting up a base camp at the mansion, they have the sense to set up with everyone in the same area, so that if something happens, everyone's there.

After that, the all ignore that area and get attacked over and over when they go off exploring on their own. The women get raped by ghosts and demons and what have you. Particularly when "RVing" (remote viewing. or astral projection or whatever you want to call it)

And after the first time one of the women get raped, they just keep right on "RVing" in are remote area of the mansion, totally by themselves and then they get raped again. and again. and again. Until finally one of them just gets sucked into hell and her body possessed. Which is what she deserves for being so damn stupid, anyways.

At any rate, at the end, nothing comes together and you're left looking at this book full of demons with penises all over their bodies, women bleeding to death, while masturbating with their own severed hands wondering just why the hell you bothered sticking it out to the end.

I got this book for free and I still felt ripped off.

I still haven't decided if I like Edward Lee's novels. The basic ideas in Flesh Gothic seem pretty "can't miss" for me - haunted house, occult rituals, demons and demonic possession. But, the story just didn't click 100% for me.

There are a couple of reasons why this novel may not have worked for me. I think that after reading a handful of his novels, his other work takes on an air of predictability. This novel is no exception. Also, at times it seems that some of his literary excesses - gore, sex, depravity - almost become boring and tedious. Again, this holds true for Flesh Gothic.

On the positive side, Edward Lee is typically not very scary, but there actually were some creepy parts in this story.