Review: Entertaining But Over-ambitious
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 29, 2013
Kind of like an old E.C. comic book in the form of a novella, "Bad Billy" starts off well, telling the tale of a monster, created by inbreeding, the Bad Billy of the title. The backwoods Georgia characters are broadly-drawn yet amusing and the tone came across to me as more of a horror spoof than anything truly disturbing, which I think was for the best given the level mayhem in the story. Accepting "Bad Billy" for what it is allowed me to excuse the expected limits of characterization and style, concentrating more on the action and general creepiness. However, during the second half, I think author Jimmy Pudge was over-ambitious, bringing werewolves and vampires into a story already crowded with ordinary human characters. In fairness, this is not a genre I normally read, but I still found it to be entertaining for the most part.