Extreme Horror Review: "Fish Pie Face Fuck!" by Sean Hawker

“Fish Pie Face Fuck” by Sean Hawker is one of the most sick, twisted, depraved, vile, and abhorrent extreme horror books I’ve ever read. The story follows two brothers Jon and Spencer, who engage in depraved acts with a recently murdered woman named Wendy, as well as the head of their “mum”. One day Spencer tells Jon he wants a “woman of his own” and they embark on a night out in Gloucester to look for someone for Spencer.

This book was short, quick, fast paced, and absolutely horrifying.

For extreme horror books I tend to base any thoughts less on the quality of the story to stand as an “all time literary classic”, but on how fucked up and disgusting it is while still maintaining an engaging and entertaining story structure. Going into these books I do expect a lot of shock value and taboo content, which seems to be a staple of extreme horror. This book delivered all of that and then some. Each page had me gagging with how disgusting it was, awful characters that I can only imagine smelled worse than a dumpster fire filled with bags full of public restroom waste. A constant throughout this short story/novella is the depravity of necrophilia, many examples of unhygienic spaces. The smell imagined from the settings in this book would make a rotting fish pie sound like a field of fresh daisies. The way the decomposing Wendy is described is nauseating, covered in maggots in every orifice, experiencing rot. To the disgusting living environment of Jon and Spencer. I can confidently say there is not very much left to the imagination in “Fish Pie Face Fuck” and take that however you want to. I felt that some of the dialogue was written with the intention to just add to the shock value, which can come off as lazy or amateurish, but the writing felt at home with the genre.

An interesting aspect of this story is that the corpse of Wendy, despite being dead, is still aware of what is going on for every thing said to her and acts performed. Wendy doesn’t seem to be too put off by any of it as she is already dead, but ponders about what the after death experience is. Once killed she found herself “waking up”, but unable to move or speak, theorizing that maybe after you experience death you are still able to be aware until you fully decompose. For such a fucked up book I did not expect such a philosophical thought on death and what happens post-death. The pacing of the book was fantastic and didn’t drag on longer than it should have, each page containing some sort of depravity to keep you drawn in page after page leaving you shocked and disturbed as to how much grosser the story can get. One of the best parts of the book was the climax towards the end after Jon and Spencer close out the night in Gloucester. This wonderfully disgusting, splatter-punk, B-movie, hyper-violence story is one I can absolutely recommend to those who are a fan of extreme horror. If you are not a fan of extreme horror I’d say STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THIS BOOK AS POSSIBLE. (available for ebook download on independent horror publisher site Godless)

- F.A.