Review: Woodhead pushes the Ick Scale to eleven with Human Filth
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 7, 2013
Ian Woodhead's Human Filth nearly lost me a few times. I love horror, and I love scary and i adore chomping, brain-eating zombies. But even I have my limits. This book holds nothing back on the Scale of Ick. You know, the scale of how many times you close your eyes and say "ick!" while reading the book. Nothing's easy in this god-forsaken vision of London. The walking dead have taken over. Rumors of even worse creatures have the few surviving humans scared half out of their minds. And of course the humans have plenty of freakiness to add to the fear factor. We are never more than a half-step above the evil creatures in Woodhead's books. We don't save the day, we don't even do the right thing, usually. We're just the lucky ones who didn't end up in a zombie's gullet. No better, no worse.With the first scenes of this book, Woodhead won me over. He masterfully revealed Raphael a camera's click at a time. A thought here, a fear there, a flash of memory, a glimpse of his face, a collage of parts, never giving the reader enough to pull together a firm mental picture of Raphael. And when suddenly the parts do come together and we see what we've been looking at the whole time, it's even MORE horrifying than if Woodhead had smacked us in the face with a full-on description right away. Because, weaklings that we are, we were trying to make Raphael out to be a good guy. And we kept sketching in our own imaginary aspects, none of which fit. But our minds shy away from the kind of monstrosity Woodhead so gleefully and expertly conjurs up for our reading pleasure.Definitely a book to read, although I haven't read the earlier books in the series. This book was provided to me as a review copy by the author. God Bless Him and his evil little heart.