Here we go again. If you have been following my reviews you know I tend to butt literary heads with White. Yes, he is a competent writer capable of some lean, mean prose that packs a wallop. If you are an extreme horror fan—don’t get me wrong. I am not a prude—it takes a lot to shock and/or disgust me. My issues with the novella at hand, “His Pain” are similar to those of the previous mediocre reviews I provided his work.
The first has to do with lapses in his writing, areas of sloppiness that seem all the more glaring since most of his prose is aggressive, to the point and provocative. There are several instances in this novella where the reader is told something only to be shown that a character is telling another character the same thing in dialog a couple of pages later.
Then, the main issue arose about halfway through this novella that plagued the stories in “The Book of a Thousand Sins”—gratuitous sex. As I stated in the review of “Thousand Sins” not all horror stories involving murder are not automatically required to involve some level of kinky sex or rape. But if you refer to any book I have read by White, you would think this is the case.
The story being presented here is of a boy born into a horrific life. He has a condition that makes even the most benign stimuli extremely painful. White begins the tale with a sensitive portrait of the child and his parents, the torment this brings them, but about halfway through he turns the corner toward another of his extreme rampages of sex and violence.
I can’t give much away, for there would be little plot left to spoil if I did, but let’s just say if twenty pages in, when I felt sorry for this kid’s mother, I knew I was supposed to believe she would willfully perform oral sex on her son and then allow him to degrade her with sadistic sexual violence—well, I might have stopped reading.
I can’t recommend this, even if you are a fan of White and extreme horror. I feel like it derails about halfway through. Zero stars for scare factor—I was repulsed, but never scared.
– George Wilhite
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
