Horror Review: Home Intruder 2 - Born This Way by Sam West (2015, Amazon Kindle)

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First thing you should know going in: while Home Intruder 2 is billed as "An extreme horror novel" on the cover, in truth it's barely even a novella. It's initial page count looks promising at just over eighty, but it struggles to break seventy, with the remaining ten or so pages belonging to an excerpt of another of West's books. I don't mind when authors or publishers do this in full-length fiction (hell, it's becoming a trend in the publishing world nowadays to have two different stories teased in the back pages), but doing it at the end of what is basically a short story strikes me as a dick move.

I always feel bad writing negative reviews, but honestly, there's so little to recommend West's novella that I'm unable to do otherwise. His characters, what few there are in this short story, are so flat and two-dimensional they may as well be window clings, and the 'psychopath with delusions of grandeur' West presents in antagonist Edward Sullivan could have been culled from any number of sub-par films you can catch on late-night television. As a writer one should strive for memorable villains--Edward's only memorable for how forgettable West made him: a sociopathic pretty boy, the by-product of the rape of his mother by a serial killer two decades ago, brought up without the love he craved, living the life of a tortured artist who wants to tell the world his story but fears the never-ending anal tragedy of his prison term should he be captured.

Gee, where could I possibly have read about a character like this before?

This is the problem with billing yourself as an extreme horror author and your works as extreme horror novels. West has a grotesque imagination, exposing his cardboard stand-up characters to a plethora of stomach-churning fates, but there's no life behind the eyes, as it were. Dialog is plodding, with character's inner thoughts splaying on for pages and pages at a time when far less would do, but then if there were much less to this book, you couldn't even call it a novella proper.

That leaves us with a couple of scenarios, but two or three interconnected scenarios do not a story make. The ending, which I'm sure West intended to shock, is absolute schlock, with one character behaving in exactly the way Edward predicted she would, even though he's not there to prevent her from acting in a contrary way and shattering his carefully-laid plans for the future. In the hands of another writer, one who understands how to stretch the reader's imagination, this could be a powerful ending. But West never gives the reader the chance to really put himself or herself in the shoes of Hazel, his primary victim. I can sympathize with her suffering and the agony she endured, but I can't empathize with the decision she makes at the end. I get she was traumatized, I understand Edward brutalized her, but ultimately no one roots for a heroine who is so easily broken in a horror story. I don't mind a depressing ending, but Hazel (and the rest of Edward's victims for that matter) spend so much of the story giving up when they should be fighting back. Even when it becomes clear they're going to die after Edward's through with them, no one displays that 'fight or flight' instinct, instead allowing themselves to be put through one humiliating scenario after another until Edward's filmed enough.

This smacks of characters behaving the way the writer needs them to behave, instead of the way they should behave, and that's a huge no-no when it comes to horror. Horror protagonists, to survive, need to be willing to fight. Hazel's not willing to do that, and she not only survives but continues to carry out Edward's long-term plan after he can't possibly stop her from deviating and screwing everything up. That's not only weak, that's downright insulting to both the audience and to women in general.

I don't throw the term 'misogyny' around lightly when it comes to horror--it's easy to claim horror's misogynistic with the way it routinely treats women at the hands of the common dominant male antagonist, but bad things directed at women by a writer are not evidence of misogyny by default. That has to come from something deeper, an in-built lack of respect for the autonomy and personhood of female characters by their author. A woman subjected to bad things alone isn't sufficient to warrant this label. The way West treats his women in this story, however, is. Stripped of their agency, bereft of common sense, presented as little more than pigs being led to their deaths after which West will use their blood as ink to write his story, it just feels wrong here. I don't think West hates women (he might--I don't know the man, so I'm in no place to make such a determination), but he certainly has no idea how to use them as proper characters, at least not in this story.

Finally, the author's just too in love with his antagonist. Edward has every gift a man could ask for: beautiful blue eyes, perfect hair, tight body, quiet brooding intensity that makes all the girls drench their panties at the thought of being its focus, cunning intellect, devious mind, an artist's flare, and charisma coming out his ears. It's not described, but I presume he's also packing a twelve-inch cock and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Kama Sutra guaranteed to bring every woman he's with to mind-shattering orgasm in minutes, because at this point, why the hell not?

Home Intruder 2: Born This Way is barely-competent horror, 'extreme' in none but the most ironic 1990's application of the word. It serves its purpose, but that purpose is either a stepping stone on the way to finding better examples of the genre, or proving the ability to string words together in a grammatically-correct format over the course of seventy pages doesn't mean you've said anything of merit.

Two bloody secateurs out of five, and it earns the second only by virtue of the fact I finished it as I don't consider it fair to review books I don't complete. I spent longer writing this review than I spent reading the story just to keep everyone else from wasting their time. Don't make my sacrifice in vain.