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Originally Posted by Moritz
the other is... I had the feeling that the authors of the book had a morbid fascination with the topic and I found that icky.
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I'm glad to reassure you that I don't have any such morbid fascination!
The Book of Unremitting Horror was, in a sense, a jam session between myself, Dave Allsop and the other people who worked on it. Dave came up with the initial concepts and images, which I expanded into full text entries (the myths, stories, autopsy reports and so on, as well as almost all of the rest of the written portion of the book). This went back and forth until the final version. (This does, incidentally, include cannibalistic incest - nods to the poster above.)
I wrote the bulk of it in Ian Sturrock's house in Wales. Ian was on holiday at the time and I was minding the property on my own.
He lives in a fairly remote part of Wales. It gets dark there. Very dark. And the TV screen seems to glow faintly when all the lights are off.
But anyway.
There isn't any child rape in the book. Personally, I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole, even as a horror theme. Line. No crossing. Simple as.
There is child death (that's a staple of psychological horror - I can do no better than to refer you to
Don't Look Now) and there certainly is child abuse in the tragic story of Strap Throat, who as you observe has a lot in common with Sadako of Ringu, one of my personal obsessions. The Kooks prey on children, and the cover is an especially disturbing image of that. But beyond that, I don't feel we dwelt particularly on child-related horror, certainly not to the point of fascination.
(The most disturbing entry in the book, for me, is the Death Tapper. Parasites squick me out.)
Thanks for the review. I'm very glad you felt the book warranted such high marks, and I can completely understand the reservations. It disturbs me, too. I'm reminded of a story Neil Gaiman once told about the 'diner massacre' issue of Sandman. Someone complained that it had haunted her for a week after she read it. Neil replied with something like 'How do you think I feel? I had to write it. It haunted me for a lot longer than a week.'