Puppet’s Banquet is a howling, discordant mind-fuck of a novella. Valkyrie Loughcrewe is a rare talent, and this is writing as raw as flayed skin, as ornately decadent as a bad acid trip you can’t escape from, as repulsive as a dumpster filled with spoiled meat roasting in the sun.

I mean all of those descriptives as good things.

The bare bones of the plot—a married couple on a drive through the countryside are attacked, setting into motion a series of catastrophic events for both of them—doesn’t begin to describe the insanity contained within this slim volume. Martin’s body is torn apart and monstrously reassembled, spliced together with the body of a woman, and he is now pregnant. Celia’s mind is shattered in two, with one version of herself tenuously hanging on to the real world, and the other lost in a vortex of madness, chaos, and despair.

The two of them reunite in what seems to be a hospital for rare and unusual maladies. That’s when things get really weird.

This is the first work I’ve read by Loughcrewe, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I sometimes found myself snort laughing at their audacity, at their willingness to go places few authors would dare to follow. Puppet’s Banquet is gory, disgusting, overflowing with shocking imagery that will fry your eyeballs, and absolutely essential reading if you prefer your horror on the extreme side. Tenebrous Press, the publisher, has a real knack for putting out work that challenges the reader, and rewards them for accepting that challenge.

Shout out to the cover artist, Donna A. Black, and the interior illustrator, Trevor Henderson. They both do an excellent job of capturing the dark and twisted feel of the book.

Look for Puppet’s Banquet in May from Tenebrous Press. As long as you have a taste for the morbidly extreme, you won’t be disappointed.