Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island

by Cameron Pierce

A bizarro twist on island horror stories such as Dagon, Zombi 2, and Brian Keene's Castaways. Four college seniors venture out into open waters for the tropical party weekend of a lifetime. Instead of a teenage sex fantasy, they find themselves in a nightmare of pirates, sharks, and sex-crazed monsters.

Oscar shouldn't have stolen his stepdad's boat, but he wanted to impress Colette, who he has been pining after since their freshman year. This vacation was the perfect time to let the romantic sparks fly. With his best friend Allen (and Colette's friend, Jane, the bitch) tagging along, Oscar saw no way this trip could possibly suck.

His hopes die when they are hijacked by pirates. Then their boat sinks and someone gets eaten by a shark. Finally, stranded on a tropical island with an endless supply of rum, Oscar believes their epic weekend can finally begin. But the island is populated by a savage race of beautiful women. When night falls, these women transform into grotesque monsters unlike anything ever seen in fiction.

Pulp horror with a heart, Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is the most deranged island horror story ever told.

Genres: Bizarro Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, 21st Century

83 pages, Paperback

First published December 16, 2011

About the author

Cameron Pierce is the author of eleven books, including the Wonderland Book Award-winning collection Lost in Cat Brain Land. His work has appeared in The Barcelona Review, Gray's Sporting Journal, Hobart, The Big Click, and Vol. I Brooklyn, and has been reviewed and featured on Comedy Central and The Guardian. He was also the author of the column Fishing and Beer, where he interviewed acclaimed angler Bill Dance and John Lurie of Fishing with John. Pierce is the head editor of Lazy Fascist Press and has edited three anthologies, including The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. He lives with his wife in Astoria, Oregon.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 1 out of 5]

four rich kids on a yacht encounter some pirates. a shark and a horrifyingly tortured and raped corpse make surprise appearances.



the kids and the remaining pirate find a beautiful and mysterious island. and so our tale truly begins...



this book is vile. if you like vile, you should read this book. I highly recommend it!

if you like the human body - and other sorts of bodies - to be viewed as pieces of meat to be fucked with, carcasses-to-be, then this is also your book. have fun with it!



there are surely some books that get written just to see if they could, well, be written. not to play with language or share ideas or tell a good story or scare you or amuse you or excite you or take you to a different place. books that exist just because. I haven't come across many books like that but I think this is one of them. it didn't scare me or amuse me or excite me. it did disgust me though. but you know, I can get disgusted by looking at a pile of vomit or shit. why would I want to do that? "disgust" in horror is one thing, an often valuable thing, an often important part of creating a feeling of horror, particularly body-based horror. but being disgusted just to be disgusted, for no other reason? that's not interesting to me. that's



being bored and disgusted at the same time is not a great feeling. and it is certainly not a feeling of being challenged. I would have liked to have been challenged. instead it was all just pointlessly repulsive. the attempts at humor were eye-rolling. why not just take a picture of a bucket of vomit or shit instead.

it is hard for me to understand the purpose of this endeavor. should the creation of simultaneous feelings of boredom and disgust be the goal of a writer - or any kind of artist?



I noticed Richard Laymon and Ed Lee mentioned somewhere on this book, as if Gargoyle Girls is a crazy combination of those writers. as if. Ed Lee can create disgust but he has a vision attached to that disgust; his horrific and hallucinatory panoramas are the disgusting visions of an actual artist. Richard Laymon can create an atmosphere of creepy sexual perversion; the thing is, Laymon knows how to actually create "an atmosphere". he is also a professional who knows a thing or two about building an exciting narrative. this book is no child of Laymon & Lee.

but there was something that did stand out. something extra special and extra repulsive.



one of the supporting characters is given a backstory involving his strong ability with numbers, his bright future, then a tragic accident, brain damage, a loss of his talent, a dwindling away of that bright future. sad, huh? it was an intriguing backstory - and certainly designed to create some sort of sympathy for the guy. a three-dimensional character of sorts! but as far as that goes, in a story like this one, I prefer the unreal cartoon characters of The Sex Beast of Scurvy Island. why create a sympathetic backstory when your intent is to do absolutely nothing with that story, when you plan to visit the most repugnant and viciously sadistic of tortures on that character? not only do you want to disgust and bore me, apparently you want to depress me too. that's like pulling wings off of a fly, legs off of a spider. what's the point?

girlfriend,

[Anthony Chavez · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with my last review of "A Choir of Ill Children" by Piccirilli I will open this review by stating this is not a novella for the easily turned queasy group. The cover alone is quite the turn off, what a disgusting looking creature.

The first half seemed different, definitely a different tone then what I have read of Pierce before, seemed like things were headed to a teenage hack and slash horror film direction. Then about halfway through things take a crazy turn into bizarro.

First half, kids on a private boat cruising the ocean into waters they probably shouldn't venture out onto, then NOOO pirate attack! Then YAY the teenagers win and take the pirate boat over as theirs is sinking, oh and also they took a pirate hostage. They struggle with weather to kill him or not, they somehow wind up on this beautiful, out of the travel channel, island and decide to check it out, all the while drinking a bunch of rum they stole from the pirate boat.

Second half, OH SNAP! There are crazy beautiful gargoyle girls which have enslaved men to use for their own sick sexual desires. Oh yeah, and they don't like them being there uninvited.

I'm not exactly sure what happened to the story, the switch that got flipped. It all had a B-movie slasher flick feel to it and then once the monsters/gargoyle girls showed up everything just went up in smoke, literally, with some dynamite stuck up where the sun don't shine.

All in all this was a wild ride, most of the bizarro books I read are, but the second half got a little too gross and graphic to me. Maybe it was that the disparity between the first half and second half was too great, I mean it seems as if it could even be written by 2 different people. The first half even left me wondering wait, is this the spider island? It took a while to get to the title. All in all a decent bizarro read, 3 out of 5.

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

When it comes to Bizarro authors, I think I finally met my match.

A while back, I reviewed Ass Goblins of Auschwitz by Cameron Pierce. While acknowledging the author's awesome talent in descriptive writing I also questioned the choice for his story; an actual place that is still branded in the minds of older readers as a true horror. In my mind, wedding Bizarro gross-out fantasy with the concentration camps of World War II is exceptionally bad judgement.

Pierce's new book, Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island fares better. This time, the author's inspiration is the deserted island sub-genre horror books and b-movies. You know the ones. Young couples stranded on an idyllic tropical island that is the home to horrible monsters. His novella starts out surprisingly mainstream. At first, It appears to be a Bizarro novel you can take home to mother. But when the monsters arrives, the authors goes straight-out shocker mode. There is not a bodily fluid Pierce doesn't like and and he is happy to pour it out in gallons. The author goes for the throat and his amazingly effective descriptive writing leaves nothing to the imagination. This is an exhilarating ride...

Until...

Well...I'm not exactly sure what goes wrong but the story turns downright vicious. Maybe it's because the four likable characters in the book become not very likable in an instance. Maybe it's because the gargoyle girls are never anything more than a MacGuffin style gross-out gimmick. Even with the dynamite ending (speaking of dynamite, I never would have thought of hiding a stick of TNT there!) it just felt a little off.

I recently read Andersen Prunty's The Sex Beast of Scurvy Island which covers some of the same territory. But while both books were over the top in sex-addled and scatological depictions, Sex Beast was also joyously playful. Gargoyle Girls left me a little depressed and sorry that I liked it so much.

That's right, I actually liked it. So that is what I meant by saying I met my match. Cameron Pierce has taught me the limits of what I can stomach. I will be reading more Pierce novels and probably have problems with those too. He's that good. But a good Bizarro writer's job is to test our limits. In this, the author has succeeded and for this alone, he deserves four stars at least.

[R.A. Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK...

You know what I think? I think Cameron Pierce was writing this book and about 1/2 way through said, "Fuck it." And he meant it. From about 1/2 way through, the story goes from being a merely adequately told tale about some young bucks who are stranded on an island to becoming a glorious gross-out sex bonanza, and it never looks back. I would give the first 1/2 of the book two stars. It just wasn't as good as I expected from Cameron. However, the second 1/2 earned the book two more stars, and here's why:

The pace picks up to Cheetah-sprint speed and doesn't slow. The characters, well who cares, they are there to be fucked at this point, and they get fucked. Well, raped really. Really hard. One man gets raped so hard he tears in two. That's the level we're dealing with here.

I don't want to spoil it for you people who are curious, so I won't tell you any more of the horrors that await you in this book, but I will tell you that it is superb. If you're into that sort of thing.

There are some real gems in this book. Like this:

"[...] fingering her anus as he did so, first with one finger, then with two. He found it pleasantly and surprisingly pliable."

If that sort of thing makes you laugh, this book is for you.


Also, on a closing note, Cameron offers some food for thought for any guys whose girlfriends have never orgasmed. You might just be looking in the wrong place.

Gross, hilarious, and pretty much an insane excuse to describe in detail a lot of monster rape. I loved this book.

[Horror Bookworm Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four friends become stranded on an island after their boat becomes a targeted victim of sea pirates. Their journey through shark infested waters and a creature infested island become a vacationers worst nightmare and an extreme unimaginable bizarro adventure for the reader.
Published by Eraserhead Press, Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island by Cameron Pierce offers vivid imagery scenarios that consume every earthy hairless word on every pulsating wormy page. Included is a blurb from legendary Lloyd Kaufman on the front cover of the book. This translates into “buckle up for a wild and crazy ride”. If the King of Disruptive Media puts his stamp of approval on any form of creative art, then it qualifies for an automatic purchase. The story kicks off with the introduction of a irresponsible and frequently impulsive group of main characters. Pierce then emerges the small bunch onto a deserted tropical island inhabited by blubbery flesh creatures that would make a mockery of any recognizable human feature. Nymphomaniac savages, gargoyle gore and beautiful native women capable of transforming into something beyond words all ripen the plot. Cameron Pierce gives the reader vivid phantasmagoric imageries that promise to stain the temporal lobe for a great deal of time.
Having entered the world of bizarro fiction on many occasions, and exploring the number of titles that these authors have to offer, Cameron Pierce is definitely one of my favorites. You never know where he will take you and what will be waiting for you when you get there. A strong recommendation from the Horror Bookworm.
https://horrorbookwormreviews.wordpre...

[Dustin Reade · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book was..different. Not what I expected. Very good, but there was something about the last few chapters that left me scratching my head a little. I mean, this is Bizarro, and I am used to things turning pretty weird, but the thing about this book that was weird for me was not the story itself, but the tone. It changes completely for a handful of pages and becomes a bit disjointed and sarcastic.
Don't get me wrong, it was funny, and it was Cameron Pierce, so it was awesome. The story made sense in the way that Bizarro stories do, but the voice itself changed at one point and it changed enough for me to notice it when it happened.
It didn't make me enjoy the book any less, I just wasn't ready for it, so it shook me out of the fantasy for a moment or two. But I got right back into it, because Pierce continuously ups the weirdness ante and really delivers on some truly unforgettable fiction. The monsters are clearly visualized, and the reader has no trouble seeing the things Pierce describes.
But like I said, the voice shift was a bit odd, and for that reason I took away one star. I would have taken away only half-a-star, but Goodreads does not allow such things.

stupid goodreads.

[Andrew Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Cameron Pierce is always a treat and this book is no different.

If you want to have fun, read Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island.

[Horror DNA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cameron Pierce's Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island has drawn comparisons to some of the biggest names in horror. While it's true that you can hear echoes of H.P. Lovecraft and Cameron PierceBrian Keene in this tome, the best thing about Gargoyle Girls is that it's entirely a Pierce book. This means the prose is sharp and intelligent, the twists are wild and come at you fast, there's plenty of humor and the story will be over before you want it to be. As with every book I've read by this Wonderland Book Award-winning author, the first page managed to hook me in and my attention was ensnared until the last word.

You can read Gabino's full review at Horror DNA by clicking here.

[Sheldon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cameron Pierce is a sick puppy. Having read some of Pierce's previous work, I knew was to expect in terms of the violence, gore, and sexy stuff, an expectation that I did not have the advantage of when I read Ass Goblins of Auschwitz . In addition, his short story in Christmas on Crack should have cleared this up. Which made Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island a bit unexpected. Hold on. I'll explain in a moment.

The story starts with four college students on break in the Caribbean in a boat being chased by pirates. After their boat is damaged and they managed to commandeer the pirates' boat, the four students and one of the pirates wind up on a mysterious deserted island...or so they think. You know things are ominous when Oscar, the main character in the novel, tries to identify their position by the stars but can't recognize any constellations.

The writing overall is very good. It's very descriptive, both in scenes and action, and there's a dark humor, too. I couldn't help but laugh a bit when Oscar accidentally injures Allen. Or I'm just sick, and reading too much Bizarro fiction. Either way, it works in a sadistic way.

The first half of the book felt...normal. Way too normal. And tame, primarily focused on the pirate attack and then being stranded on the island and the relationships between the characters. This is what was so unexpected. Maybe this was Pierce's goal, to lull the reader with a false sense of security and a change of style from his previous work. But the book is really divided into two parts, or could have even been written by two different authors. This first half is quite tame compared to most of the other stuff I've read by Cameron Pierce. It doesn't feel like a Bizarro novel. The gargoyle girls of the title don't even appear until around the halfway point.

Unfortunately, this is also where the book's central problem comes in. The book changes gears way too fast. There's little to no ramping up of the action or weirdness. Instead, Pierce smacks the reader in the face suddenly with what I have come to expect from him, reminding you that you are indeed reading a Cameron Pierce novel. It's a bit like sailing relatively gentle seas with the occasional rolling wave, then getting hit by a tidal wave out of nowhere. This inconsistency becomes this book's biggest failing, at least for this reviewer, as the dramatic change in tone pulled me off the page and reminded me that I was reading a book and not there with the characters. But I think what makes it so jarring is that what felt like the novel's real story is way too short, and that there was potential for a lot more development of the gargoyle girls and the society on the island. They're just sort of there. It felt less than undercooked, even half-finished.

It's a decent book (in terms of quality, not morals), but unfortunately it doesn't achieve greatness with this reviewer. The tone and style change too quickly, and it takes half the novel before the real action that you would expect from the title to even start. As such, Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island by Cameron Pierce earns three bottle of pirate rum out of five.

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the third time I started this book, got about five pages deep and decided that I just wasn't in the mood for a pulpy romp yet, I finally found the there's-a-car-on-fire-and-I-just-can't-look-away point. What ensued left me assuring myself that my fear of large aquatic bodies is totally justified because boating adventures almost always end in catastrophe. This one, for example, began with a pirate chase and ended with a dude eagerly anticipating his future as a necrophiliac. The rest of the tale included things that not even my most dementedly vivid nightmares could conjure. Like a penis breaking in half from being forced into too many orifices. And a vagina-baby (NOT as obvious of a description as you'd think!) being sexxed to death. And a woman asserting her alpha-femaleness by painting herself with her own menstrual blood.

While the other bizarro books I've read seem to focus on people dealing with strange impositions that wreak havoc on their daily lives, this is the first one that flung its characters right into the fire: There's no shred of normalcy to be found on Spider Island. The body count climbs as the main characters try to wring some sense from their surroundings, going so far as clinging to the time-honored coping method of writing all the weirdness off as a drunken illusion, when the only thing that could kind of save them from the native babes' sacrifices and unwelcome corporeal pillaging is to embrace their inner savages. Which they finally do. And which also involves being stuffed like Thanksgiving turkeys with dynamite.

"Gargoyle Girls" has the dubious honor of being the first book since "American Psycho" that put my claims of possessing a nigh infinite capacity for the deranged to the test, as well as being the vehicle by which I discovered the uncomfortable delight of referring to olfactory offenses as "smelling like stomach rape." I had a few moments of wondering if certain details were necessary to the story rather than the shock value they brought to it but was usually surprised to find such things being resurrected as valid plot components. Though this be madness, aye, there really was some method in't after all.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A small group of teenagers set sail for a short vacation only to crash head first into disaster. They wind up stranded on an island in the middle of the "Spider Web" which is a fictitious equivalent to the Bermuda Triangle. This sets the stage for the rest of the story with an "anything goes" kind of attitude. Yeah, things get crazy...very crazy.

The characters are well thought out and while dealing with the issues at hand also deal with internal issues stereotypical to any graduating teen. Love, lust, blood, sharks, pirates and more!

I cannot elaborate on too much without ruining the story but I will say this is NOT a book for the easily offended. If you can take humor and entertainment in extremely absurd and somewhat crude fictional situations, this is for you.

After reading a lot of Cameron's work I realized that he's the "hopeless romantic" of the Bizarro bunch but you'll soon find out that we're all damned in the end.

[S.B. (Beauty in Ruins) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cameron Pierce's Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is probably the most immediately accessible of the Bizarro books I've read to date, and also the easiest to enjoy. It's a very straightforward contemporary tale, told in a linear fashion, by a comfortably reliable third-person narrator. Actually, if you ignore the sexually mutilated corpse in the closet of the pirates' boat, the first half of the story is pretty standard horror fiction. With coeds on a stolen boat, depraved (if somewhat inept) pirates, sharks in the water, and a tropical paradise that you know must be too-good-to-be-true, it reminded me in many ways of Richard Laymon's Island.

Of course, when it goes off the rails into the extreme darkness of the Bizarro world, it does so quickly and without reservation. Like any truly great slasher story, where the dirty sinners must be punished, it all begins to go wrong with a bout of drunken, illicit sex, preceded by some rather bloody foreplay. Afterwards, Oscar heads down to the beach to take a leak, where he is promptly ambushed by (you guessed it) one of the gargoyle girls. A monstrous blob of writhing flesh, with as many tooth-filled sexual orifices as bugged-out eyes, she rapes the young man in more ways than one, at both ends, and all at once. The moment she's done, however, she transforms into an Amazonian beauty who looks as though she just walked off the set of a glossy porno movie.

From there, it all descends into a hell of sexual slavery, inhuman depravity, and very human cruelty. You know it's not going to end well, but Pierce offers up some truly inspired scenes of punishment and revenge that are guaranteed to make your toes curl and your stomach churn. Rectal dynamite plays a significant role - not once, but twice! - and the sharks make a final cameo appearance before Pierce pushes the story completely over the edge, giving Oscar the kind of happy ending that only the most brutally perverse could ever appreciate.

Twisted, warped, and just wrong on so many levels, it's also a story that is one hell of a lot of guilty fun.


Originally reviewed at Beauty in Ruins

[Jeremy Maddux · Rating 4 out of 5]

I also took notice of the abrupt shift in tone halfway through which Rob and a few others outlined in earlier posts. I think the tone shifted for the better.

Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island starts as a soft, safe deserted island story until the eponymous life forms of the book's title show up to begin wreaking havoc on everyone's reproductive systems.

If I had to point to exactly where the book shifts gears, I would have to say it's when the sexual frustration of the situation begins to affect the strandees. Oscar has always had a thing for Collette, and with civilization nothing but a distant memory, this idea of Collette as this unattainable relic is what he has pinned all his hopes on. She tries to gross him out by detailing her bowel movements and the fact that her period has started, but when his boner still doesn't go away, she concedes defeat and they make love. I can relate to this, as no woman I've ever been attracted to has never been able to gross me out. It just can't be done. Most guys I know feel this way.

Anyway, Oscar becomes a sexual butterfly of the beach that night, because he is accosted by one of the natives, a creature covered in bubbling sores, eyes like egg whites, multiple vaginas, or vagina dentatas rather. He gets busy for the second time in one night. When he says he was raped by a monster the next morning, Collette thinks he's referring to her.

So it might seem like I'm reviewing merely one scene from this book, but every time I look at that cover or see someone talking about it online, it's the first scene I think of. For me, that is the turning point of the book, because everything from then on continues to devolve until Collette begins to lose her hold on both he sanity and humanity. Oscar is captured, and Collette paints herself in her own menstrual blood and enters the village of the creatures to rescue him.

I've read everything in Cameron's ouevre now, and I can say this one is the odd one out, because it features very few of his usual stylistic choices and motifs. Maybe he was trying to put his own twist on the work usually reserved for Carlton Mellick. Whatever the case, it had the kind of bleak outcome that reminded me of my first viewing of Cannibal Holocaust.

[James Meeks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy crap! What did I just read.

Well in my honest opinion one of the damn finest, entertaining, fast reading books I've jumped into in sometime (not to be confused with Jeff Burk's Cripple Wolf that has been placed at my number one spot for best books in the last few years). Well, honesty again, isn't everything Eraserhead and all their various sub-publishing houses put out about the same. Fun quality read after fun quality read.

I'd only read one other book by Cameron Pierce, Ass Goblins, and this one I just had to read. A) the title just reminded me of something pulpy. B) the comparison to Ed Lee, Jeff Burk and Lloyd Kaufman with badly brewed evil LSD thrown in. And guess what I have to read it!!

This is the kind of book you set a couple hours aside and read in one sitting. Grab a brew, light one up, swallow a mushroom or two. Or even if you must pretend to be only reading this for its literary merit. Not that the book is devoid of good vocabulary, nicely descriptive passages, and a well paced moving plot. Really this is just pure entertainment!! Come on with lines like...

"I guess that's the mark of a true friend. Someone who will shove dynamite up their ass and take the blow for you." (you'll have to read it to get that one)

You know you're going to laugh. Plus the comparison to Ed Lee and Richard Laymon is right on the money with some extremely disturbing moments...but damn I laughed at most of those too.

I don't really like giving story spoilers, but a simple breakdown...

Four friends go on a boating cruise, meet pirate, lose boat, get stranded on island, drink, romance, possible drunken hallucinations, realization they are somewhere unworldly, island folk show up...and now you'll have to spend the few measly bucks to grab a copy.

Well worth it for fans of the bizarre, Filipino horror films of the 70's, Lee, gore, humor and reading something that'll put a smile on your face.

[Matthew Vaughn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cameron Pierce was one of the first bizarro authors that I read, starting with Abortion Arcade. Since then I have read a few more of his books and stories, each one has been original and entertaining. Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island followed right along with everything else I have read by him, but I think this may be my least favorite of his books. This was still a good read, entertaining and imaginative in a bizarre and grotesque way.
The book starts out like a B-rated horror movie, with a few young adults cruising the high seas on one of their dad’s boats. They encounter some pirates on some pretty bad waters and have a little scuffle, which leads to one boat being sunk and the survivors heading for the nearest shore. This particular land that they end up at is Spider Island. From here things go from island paradise to monster fest. Pierce keeps the action cranked up and the weird factor increases consistently throughout the book.
I have read quite a few bizarro books, and I am quite the fan of the genre. But this book may have some of the sickest scenes I’ve read. There are some truly disgusting moments in this book. There are probably worse books out there as far as that goes, but I haven’t been reading them. Still, if you’re a fan of bizarro and of Pierce, you will enjoy this book.

[Kat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not going to get into a story summary, as many other reviewers here have done a fabulous job of it already. I will just cut to my feelings on Cameron Pierce's latest work...

In agreement with a few of the other reviewers, I felt this book was disjointed and rushed (at least the later half). This is the fourth Pierce book I have read, and this one seemed to stray from his usual writing. I wouldn't have minded it except that, while the first half was almost too tame for what I would normally expect from one of his novels, the second half was almost too unnecessarily grotesque. I don't mind violence, sex, etc., but it seemed that the abundance of graphic sexual acts in this book was borderline pushing pointless. Once that section of the book kicked in, it seemed that that was all it was and the construction of the plot went to the wayside.

On the other hand, I liked the first half of the book, which was a little toned-down for Pierce's usual writing style. Is this part, for lack of a better term, "normal?" Absolutely not. There are still elements of bizarro, which I love.

I think Cameron Pierce is a very promising author. While I wasn't totally sold on this book, I am definitely a fan and would recommend his work to anyone that likes bizarro and has a strong stomach. ;)

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before getting this book I had yet to read anything from Cameron Pierce but in the pursuit of find more good authors I was willing to give him a go. Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is his 7th bizarro fiction novel and is the latest released so far.[return][return]The story starts off more like a regular horror story where four teens end up being stranded on an island with lots of rum after they get attacked by pirates. But around half way through the bizarro starts to kick in when they discover what is on the other side of the island. I don't want to ruin any surprises and say what happens but this is where you get assaulted by the sex, blood and violence within the story.[return][return]So overall this is an entertaining book which can be read in one or two sittings by a young author who has the potential for many great books ahead of him. So if your open minded about your horror stories then you will enjoy this book.

[Daniel Vlasaty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gargoyle Girls of Spider Island is a deserted island horror story. A group of horny, drunk teens gets stranded on an island after their boat is attacked by pirates, and the natives are all kinds of horrible. It might sounds like a pretty clichéd story, but in the hands of Cameron Pierce it is anything but clichéd. And that trashy b-movie feel reads very well. I actually read this on the beach in Key West. The overweight tourists seen from afar started to freak me out.

This book really felt more like a true horror story than a Bizarro story. Don’t get me wrong it still had all the things Bizarro fans have come to love. It was a gory, sexy, bloody monster fest. It was up there with Apeshit. Highly recommended for Bizarro and horror fans alike.

[Stevie Tee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note to self: Don’t get stranded on Spider Island. My fear of spiders has nothing to do with this. In fact, I’m not sure if there was even a spider mentioned. There were, on the other hand, plenty of naked Island women, insane violence, and creatures with more vaginas than you can shake a stick at. Not that I recommend shaking a stick at those vaginas. My suggestion is that you should avoid them altogether. This book on the other hand should not be avoided, as it is a must read for the bizarro enthusiast. It’s hectic, it’s weird, and it’s a lot of fun from the first word to the last.

[April · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm totally a lightweight when it comes to gross, disgusting things. As a result most of this book made me nauseous. I liked Pierce's writing style initially, and I had some idea of what I was in for considering the summary and cover, but not enough of an idea by any stretch of the imagination.

Personally I would just not recommend this title to anyone, but I'm sure it will appeal to fans of a more extreme bizarro than I tend to gravitate towards.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

For spotty, mouth-breathing, 30-somethings living in their parents' basement.

Honestly if you love low-brow, splatterpunk this is the book for you.

If you fear women and female sexuality...this is the book for you.

If don't care about character development, dialogue, style, or dramatic tension...this is the book for you.

If you are a so-called Bizarro aficionado...this is the book for you.

My rating says it all.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an absolute fun book to read, and I had a great time immersing myself in it. The story builds gradually, then maybe around a third of the way through we begin to see things happen that make you kinda scratch your head. So now we start getting a little curious about what's going to happen here. A short while later all hell breaks loose, then it becomes a non-stop hurricane of chaotic misfortunes until the end. This one definitely rates 5-stars for the entertainment value alone.

[David Barbee · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Pierce's best. Loads of gore, sex, and unrequited love. It's a mixture of hardcore horror and bizarro, and takes a turn for the surreal near the end. It makes for a weird (and well-told) story that's a solid entry to any reader's bizarro library.

[natercopia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kind of know what to expect from the synopsis but it took me deeper into the DARK world that bizarro fiction (cameron pierce) have to offer. I cringed, disgust at what the story offered and at most parts i was unsettled. Serve me right for reading this book.

[Brian Mcclain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, it was fast, breakneck almost throughout most of it. The characters were kinda shallow, but it suited the novel. Beasts were interesting, and disgusting and honestly I knew what I was in for so it was entertaining. Good stuff for sure.