With an impressive line-up of almost every big name in extreme horror between the cover of Matt Shaw’s newest anthology, ‘Battered Broken Bodies’ is a must-buy book for fans who prefer their stories bursting with blood, bile and bodily fluids.

Within these pages you can expect to find stories of;

• A lawyer at a pharmaceutical company who contracts a deadly illness that causes his body to, quite literally, turn on itself
• A revolutionary new procedure that allows the wealthy to swap bodies with death row inmates
• A visit to Grandma’s house which turns into a house of horrors for Jack
• A man looking to move on from his traumatic childhood following the death of his estranged mother, and the nightmare that waits for him in his former home
• A young student’s infatuation with his teacher and the extreme lengths he will go to in order to get to know her better
• Two friends re-telling an urban legend of the girl who swallowed a cherry stone which grew into a tree, little knowing the real truth behind the myth.

Given I’m not a first-time reader of the vast majority of the authors that feature in ‘Battered, Broken Bodies’ I thought I knew what I was letting myself in for. Even with my sense of good taste and decency left to one side and my sick bag at the ready, I still found myself physically gagging at some of the content. I’m not sure anything can quite prepare you for reading stories ‘The Gift’ by Jon Athan, or ‘Drainage’ by Wesley Southard. These shorts are the kind of gleefully over the top gross-out stories where you just know the author had as much fun writing them as you did wishing you hadn’t been eating while reading them.

There is a great mix of extreme horror trailblazers, such as Wrath James White, Ryan Harding and Shaun Hutson, alongside a newer, but equally infamous, group of modern macabre masterminds, Sam West, Aron Beauregard and Rayne Havok. You get a sense that everyone involved is trying to one-up the other by writing the most disgusting, the most vomit-inducing and the most over-the-top debauchery that it is possible to concoct and, despite the consistently taboo subject matter, there is generally a sense of fun and satire to a lot of the stories that tend to be present when any story takes things to a ridiculous extreme.

It is hard to pick highlights as every story boasts, a memorable scene or premise, but none are more original than Jasper Bark’s ‘Peekaboo ICU’. It is such a fantastic idea for a Splatterpunk story and so well executed, it was definitely a high point for me. I would love to see this attempted as a short film because the visuals were spectacular. Special mention to the editor, Matt Shaw’s own contribution, the two-part ‘Chicken and the Egg’, and Jonathan Butcher’s ‘A Threesome with Carcia’, which has the best closing sentence of any story I have ever read.

‘Battered, Broken Bodies’ delivers exactly what you would want an extreme horror anthology to, namely a collection of stories as inventive as they are appalling. There wasn’t a single story that felt it didn’t belong and every short more than earns its place in a collection that promises body horror of the most disgusting variety. Reading this book is, I imagine, a lot actually going through the things it depicts; you may have fun doing it, but you’ll almost certainly need a shower afterwards.
21 s Renée224 3

Wonderful collection! I enjoyed all the stories but my personal faves were The Gift (it made me nauseous!) & A Nec”Romantic” Love Story.
A great book to end 2021 with.14 s KillerBunny221 111

A special mention to Aron Beauregard for my favorite story of the book.favorite12 s David45 18

I had to read this in pieces. the first story alone set the gruesomeness of this collection.11 s Lori182 7

Not for the faint of heart. Hopefully one would know that going into this but just an FYI. My personal favorites were The Garden of Ethan, Inside Man, and Doctor Goodhew's Methods.10 s Stefanie Duncan301 22

First of all, I purchased this book as a physical book not on the kindle. I have no idea why godreads does not let me change this. Frustrating.

Anyways, this anthology of body horror is phenomenal!

Every story in this book is fantastically shocking, repulsive, disgusting, and nasty as a fan of the extreme horror genre could hope for. And I loved every page of it.

So many good and established authors (and a few ones I haven't heard about before) added their own flair to make this anthology so powerful and haunting. Some of these stories will brand their images into the readers brain. I couldn't possibly pick one or even more favorite stories because they are all worth to be hyped up.

I highly recommend this anthology if you're a fan of the extreme and body horror. This is your thing! I would add trigger warnings but that would be a very long list.

Enter at your won risk to the wonderful world of body horror (but maybe this is a risk you should take, my dear extreme bookworm).

7 s renee w199

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Athan,Beauregard,Ralston.Triana,Shaw and so many more …..Ohh My! Literally the best of the best. This is a must read for all extreme horror fans. 7 s Rachel M375 13

Great collection, you can’t really go wrong! So many brilliant extreme horror authors in the same place
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