Indie Book Review: Horrors of The Shopping Mall Ass Slasher

What a title, right? And that cover!

R.J. Benetti's Horrors of the Shopping Mall Ass Slasher is, as you might imagine, about an ass slasher terrorizing mallgoers in the late 80s. Buy it for the cover, read it for the prose.

Seriously, Benetti's writing is electric. I read a piece of writing advice once that said you should always try to write a sentence in such a way that only you could have written it. Benetti is a prime example of this rule.

I mean, look at these passages:

A shopping mall. Like pimples, they’d popped up all over America’s big rear-end, pulling the eager citizenry into their greasy sebum pits of debt, of consumerism.

and

Imagine a sauna pumped with coffee breath, cigarette smoke, a dash of donuts, and a spoonful of wet powdered egg. That’s the stench.

and

Bobbie turned, her eyes as big as Henny Penny’s funnel cakes, as wet as the condensation on a freshly poured pint at Hiccup Sauce’s Tavern.

Beyond that, this book has a lot of gore and grossness, but also a surprising amount of heart. I grew pretty attached to the characters and found myself really rooting for Doyle, the obese mall cop who longs to be a hero.

To that end, I wish there had been a little more closure with certain characters. At the same time, I LOVE THE ENDING.

Go read this book!

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