"Bloodbath at Landsdale Towers" by Michael Boatman (BADASS HORROR)

The Nastiest Story that I've Ever Had the Pleasure to Publish (Twice!)

I knew of Michael Boatman from Spin City. He stood out in a sitcom loaded with talent. When Chris and Michael sent me his story, I was intrigued. Many actors write fiction including Julianne Moore, James Franco and George Kennedy. Even Steve Martin wrote a book. I opened the file with cautious optimism and read:

Danny Wahlberg, twenty-one, white, and dumb as a box of chicken turds, cleared his throat, blinked three times and said: “You want me to do what?”

Lennox Ravanaugh, thirty-nine, black and mean as a Republican with rattlesnake up his dickhole, held up one of a dozen little plastic packets that sat on the table in front of him.

“I said I want you to fuck your sister up the ass.”

And I thought “Oh fuck yeah!!!” No way am I missing a chance to publish this story. If every other BADASS HORROR story was Mormon vampires and Dragonball Z fanfiction, I'd still publish it to get this story into the world. “Bloodbath at Landsdale Towers” is fucked up, hilarious and angry – basically everything great about Splatterpunk. Every character is a bastard. Every scene is grotesque. Almost every line is hilarious. David J. Schow cited 'The mattress smelled like a septic field behind the Mexican abortion clinic at high tide” as a favorite, but there are so many great ones.

Re-reading the story decades later and I still love it. I love it so much that I almost wish that Michael Boatman's acting career would falter so he could write more. At a horror writer's convention, he mentioned that he wrote screenplays. I eagerly wait for the day when Jordan Peele or the Terrifier producers puts out a Boatman written movie.

“Bloodbath” is simple. A drug dealer (Lennox Ravanugh) and his crew run Landsdale Towers, a housing project as pleasant as “crawling through the anal tract of a rabid she-moose at the height of mating season.” (I wish I could write sentences half as disgusting). For fun, he tortures the Wahlberg twins, privileged white teenagers from the northern Chicago suburbs, who really like crack. Enter Corners and Negrita, two black superhero vigilantes. They kill everyone in horrifying descriptive ways. Then they fly up the elevator shaft, eager for more adventure.

The Wahlbergs don't make it.

Splatterpunk begin in the 1980s as a reaction against both quiet horror and the conservative “morning in America” bullshit of the Reagan administration. Like grindhouse cinema, it screams with moral indignation. As some Americans were getting rich, others were dying of AIDS and the crack epidemic.

“Bloodbath at Landsdale Towers” reflects the 2000s, an era of messy foreign intervention and investment bankers gambling with everyone's money. There's even a reference to the third Bush administration. Oh for the days when Bush was the worst possible president. “Bloodbath” revels in a free floating rage that hasn't gone away. Lennox Ravanagh is a bastard, but for a few pages it's fun to watch him torture privileged little shits who would otherwise be applying to Harvard and Columbia University. Instead of dressing down, spouting leftist cliches and living off their trust funds, they are smoking crack.

Splatterpunk is even better than reading about Luigi Mangione shooting that CEO. With Mangione, we have to temper our glee, remember that insurance companies are only one piece of a rotten healthcare system. Kill a dozen CEOs and the insurance companies won't suddenly start funding life-saving treatments nor will the health providers stop gouging patients. Guillotine pictures are fun but death-dealing revolutions never stop with the bastards that deserve it. Sooner or later, the Stalinists and the Maoists murder millions.

Splatterpunk allows us to live vicariously in a violent nasty world. There's a catharsis to reading about amoral criminals and privileged teenagers exploding and falling down elevator shafts. For many reasons, Splatterpunk is a perfect genre for our times. Michael Boatman is one of the better splatterpunk authors.

Seriously, read this guy. He's viciously hilarious.

One of his latest stories is published in Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the Africana Diaspora.

Of course, you really should buy copies of BADASS HORROR. This is the last story in the anthology, so buy your BADASS HORROR book now.

There’s also Michael Boatman’s collection of short stories entitled God Laughs When You Die (somewhere online is a list of his alternate titles. God’s Top Ten Dirty Jokes still amuses me).

Finally, there’s the novel Last God Standing, which I have yet to read, but the sequel is really fun.