Book Review: The Long Last Call

The Long Last Call
by John Skipp

A mysterious stranger shows up at a rural strip club right before closing time, initiating a series of events that escalates beyond anyone's control. The stranger, you see, reveals to the club's denizens their true natures.

John Skipp basically co-founded the horror subgenre known as "spatterpunk", which emphasizes explicit sex and violence as a means of communicating a visceral experience. Lots of blood, gore, sex and guts here while at the same time he tells a pretty captivating story. It's pretty much a look at a dirty side of the human race, as the strippers secretly hate the patrons while trying to get money from them, and the lonely patrons who degrade and despise the strippers for being unatainable to them. It becomes good vs evil at a seedy strip club.

So should I be saying "strippers" or "exotic dancers" to be more politically correct? Or "pole dancers" maybe?

The book has a very good pace and it truely is one of those books for which the old cliche' "you can't put down" holds true. I kept turning the pages to learn more about this stranger and see what was going to happen next. I really like Skipp's writing style, he hooks you from the first chapter and doesn't let off the gas until the final page in this one.

In the end, he leaves a lot of things never really defined and I think the story is too short maybe. Not much is really learned about the stranger, leaving a lot of things open to interpretation of the readers. If you like causes and explanations you probably won't like this. If you like splatterpunk, you probably will.

7/10

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This paperback version I bought also has a 2nd story in it, the novella called Conscience also by John Skipp. It's about a hitman going through self exploration but really I didn't learn much about the guy and I thought it was sort of a weak story personally. Again, a lack of explanation of a lot of things and I was left really wishing it had been a 300 page book with more of his past, what made him tick and how he got as evil as he was and more about the people he worked for. It was just too short to have so many unanswered questions and it left me wanting many.

4/10