Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island [Paperback]

Cameron Pierce (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 16, 2011

A bizarro twist on island horror stories such as Dagon, Zombi 2, and Brian Keene's Castaways.

Four college seniors venture out into open waters for the tropical party weekend of a lifetime. Instead of a teenage sex fantasy, they find themselves in a nightmare of pirates, sharks, and sex-crazed monsters.

Oscar shouldn't have stolen his stepdad's boat, but he wanted to impress Colette, who he has been pining after since their freshman year. This vacation was the perfect time to let the romantic sparks fly. With his best friend Allen (and Colette's friend, Jane, the bitch) tagging along, Oscar saw no way this trip could possibly suck. His hopes die when they are hijacked by pirates. Then their boat sinks and someone gets eaten by a shark. Finally, stranded on a tropical island with an endless supply of rum, Oscar believes their epic weekend can finally begin. But the island is populated by a savage race of beautiful women. When night falls, these women transform into grotesque monsters unlike anything ever seen in fiction.

Pulp horror with a heart, Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is the most deranged island horror story ever told.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"If you were to take everything horror writers typically shy away from and mush it into one streamlined novel, you might get something like splatterpunk adventure tale Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island. Expect to see gruesome shark attacks, pirate hijackings and plenty of multi-vaginal tentacle monsters during your travels, while action, sex, and laughs compete for page space. Seriously." - RUE MORGUE

"Ever wonder what a collaboration between Edward Lee and Richard Laymon would read like? If you're a hardcore horror fan, of course the answer is yes. But have you ever wondered how that hypothetical collaboration might have turned out had someone secretly dosed them with some bad LSD at some point during the process? Well, wonder no more, because I think it may very well have turned out like Cameron Pierce's new book, Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island. Or, to put it in pithy catchphrase form, 'It's like Lost on Acid!' Either way, Gargoyle Girls is a trip." - BRYAN SMITH, author of The Killing Kind and Depraved

Praise From HORROR TALK:

"Cameron Pierce's Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island has drawn comparisons to some of the biggest names in horror. While it's true that you can hear echoes of H.P. Lovecraft and Brian Keene in this tome, the best thing about Gargoyle Girls is that it's entirely a Pierce book. This means the prose is sharp and intelligent, the twists are wild and come at you fast, there's plenty of humor and the story will be over before you want it to be. As with every book I've read by this Wonderland Book Award-winning author, the first page managed to hook me in and my attention was ensnared until the last word.

Part gory horror story, part love story, part island adventure story and all bizarro, Gargoyle Girls is yet another Pierce book that helps redefine what bizarre fiction can be. The author is a man of extremes, but he somehow manages to balance his extremes out. The story is as horrific as it's sexy, as gory as it's humorous and as weird as it's classic. For fans of horror, tensions run high, dismemberment and blood abound and evil monsters unlike any other come out at night. For fans of bizarro, the characters offer a hilarious critique of white rich kids, there's a vagina-headed baby and the ending is an epic and strange love story that could only come from the talented/twisted mind of Pierce. 

If you like your horror on the weird side, Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is a must-read."

Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: Eraserhead Press (December 16, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1621050165
• ISBN-13: 978-1621050162
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.2 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,407,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cameron Pierce is the Wonderland Book Award-winning author of Die You Doughnut Bastards, Lost in Cat Brain Land, Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island, and other books. He writes surreal nightmares that are funny, sad, sincere, and violent. His books have been praised by New York Times bestselling authors Piers Anthony and Thomas F. Monteleone, legendary cult filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman, The Guardian, Cracked.com, and New Times.

He is the editor of Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction #5. He also runs Lazy Fascist Press, publishing books by indie cult sensation Sam Pink, World Fantasy Award-winner Alan M. Clark, and books like Broken Piano for President by Patrick Wensink, which became an international bestseller.

His fiction and poetry has appeared in The Barcelona Review, The Bizarro Starter Kit (Purple), The Nervous Breakdown, The Pedestal Magazine, Word Riot, Verbicide, Avant-Garde for the New Millennium, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, The Dream People, Christmas on Crack, Nemonymous 10, Warmed and Bound, Nouns of Assemblage, Kill Author, Thieves Jargon, Bare Bone, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, The Horror Library Vol. II, Sein und Werden, and many other publications.

Cameron lives in a tiny cottage in Portland, Oregon with his wife, author Kirsten Alene.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A very intense, but crazy read February 23, 2012

By Colum 'Dreadful Tales' McKnight

Format:Paperback

Cameron Pierce has a way of grabbing the reader right from the get-go, taking them for an epic ride akin to something you'd see in a wicked b-horror flick. This story is as tight as it could possibly be and rides very smoothly. I read it in about an hour.

The story has some exceedingly extreme situations within that might turn a passive reader off, but anyone familiar with the bizarro genre will find that this sits wonderfully alongside any other titles from Eraserhead Press.

***possible spoiler alert***

The story starts off at a strong gallop and introduces its characters wonderfully. Each and every one of them is larger than life, but still retains a feel that is easy to identify with. Well... until things get very... rape-y. I mean, who doesn't find the idea of beautiful amazonian women turning into brutally monstrous gargoyes raping everything and ever appendage in sight funny? In fact, that's when the story becomes an over-the-top Laymonesque affair that blasts along like a rocket on overdrive.

This book is well worth the price.

Pierce is one of the masters of the genre and deserves all of the praise he gets.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good B-movie in a Book Vibe January 18, 2012

By Daniel Vlasaty - The Buffalo

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is a deserted island horror story. A group of horny, drunk teens gets stranded on an island after their boat is attacked by pirates, and the natives are all kinds of horrible. It might sounds like a pretty clichéd story, but in the hands of Cameron Pierce it is anything but clichéd. And that trashy b-movie feel reads very well. I actually read this on the beach in Key West, which added to the experience. The other tourists started to freak me out a bit.

This book really felt more like a true horror story than a Bizarro story. Don't get me wrong it still had all the things Bizarro fans have come to love. It was a gory, sexy, bloody monster fest. It was up there with Ape****. Highly recommended for Bizarro and horror fans alike.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Twisted, warped, and just wrong on so many levels, it's also a story that is one heck of a lot of guilty fun! March 1, 2012

By Bob Milne

Format:Paperback

Cameron Pierce's Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is probably the most immediately accessible of the Bizarro books I've read to date, and also the easiest to enjoy. It's a very straightforward contemporary tale, told in a linear fashion, by a comfortably reliable third-person narrator. Actually, if you ignore the sexually mutilated corpse in the closet of the pirates' boat, the first half of the story is pretty standard horror fiction. With coeds on a stolen boat, depraved (if somewhat inept) pirates, sharks in the water, and a tropical paradise that you know must be too-good-to-be-true, it reminded me in many ways of Richard Laymon's Island.

Of course, when it goes off the rails into the extreme darkness of the Bizarro world, it does so quickly and without reservation. It all begins to go wrong with a bout of drunken, illicit sex, preceded by some rather bloody foreplay, and followed by a trip to the beach to take a leak. There, a monstrous blob of writhing flesh, with as many tooth-filled sexual orifices as bugged-out eyes, rapes unfortunate Oscar in more ways than one, at both ends, and all at once. The moment she's done, however, she transforms into an Amazonian beauty who looks as though she just walked off the set of a glossy porno movie.

From there, the story descends into a glorious mess of sexual slavery, inhuman depravity, and very human cruelty. You know it's not going to end well, but Pierce offers up some truly inspired scenes of punishment and revenge that are guaranteed to make your toes curl and your stomach churn. Rectal dynamite plays a significant role - not once, but twice! - and the sharks make a final cameo appearance before Pierce pushes the story completely over the edge, giving Oscar the kind of happy ending that only the most brutally perverse could ever appreciate.