I first encountered John McNee in 2011 when I read a relatively mediocre extreme horror short story collection. His story was the best in the book, a dystopian, transhumanist nightmare that made the rest of the stories in the collection seem almost amateurish in comparison. I wondered how McNee would do in longer form, if he could take the amazing world-building and characterization and keep the intensity of his monstrous characters outside of the limits of a short story length. Turns out he can. If I had been in a position to have a “Best of” list in 2013, this book would have been at the top of the list. I can say with no equivocation that this is an excellent book.

Though this book is released by a bizarro imprint, I hesitate to call it bizarro. It’s noir. It’s trans-humanist. It’s extreme horror. It’s brutal and intense and at times strangely touching. It defies classification because it is a perfect synthesis of so many different influences without becoming a pastiche. This is not an imitation – it’s a creation. Because I am not a person much given to steampunk or noir, I should not have liked this book as much as I do but it speaks to McNee’s skills that he mixed subgenres I don’t much care for and I still couldn’t put the book down.

Quick synopsis of the book: In the city of Grudgehaven, we are presented with a place much like Gotham late at night combined with Sin City at all hours, with some side steps into Blade Runner and Repo: The Genetic Opera as run through a Cherie Priest novel. Criminal syndicates are at war, wreaking havoc. A gorgeous dame sings at a club and forms a strange friendship with a taxi driver. A man fights to keep his ailing wife alive during a riot. A sentient severed hand is on a mission. Human motels, in that they are motels made of human skin, have relationships with real humans. A writer finds herself in a sticky situation when she is hired to write the autobiography of a very bad man. The daughter of a preacher makes a deal with a devil of sorts. A boy made of clockworks longs to be real. And all of these single threads weave the tapestry of The Grudge, a town without pity but with plenty of malice.

You can read my entire discussion here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/grudgepunk-by-john-mcnee/ ( )