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The Function Room: The Kollection
The Function Room: The Kollection is a viseral journey through a twisted, brutal and compelling selection of stories by Matt Leyshon. "Matt Leyshon's stories manage to combine threads of dark-hued English pastoral fantasy with the logic of nightmare. Like Worzel Gummidge cast adrift in a Ligottian fever-dream, these interlinked tales carve out their own niche in which to fester." - Gary McMahon The Function Room is "deeply disturbing". "[Matt Leyshon's] stories are thick with atmosphere. His heavily stylised world drips with filth and decay." The critics say: "Reading Function Room stories is like watching a snuff movie, hideously depraved and yet so fascinating you can't take your eyes off it." "Leyshon writes stories that are so visceral and dripping with atmosphere and filth you feel the need for a shower afterwards." Matt Leyshon is a twisted genius and he wants you to enter his world - Dare you open The Function Room?
- GenresHorror
156 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2012
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51 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 7, 2013
Take an average English town where bad things happen and dark notions throng the mind. Populate it with vile, self-serving individuals, among whom even the charitable think only of themselves. Give it an intelligent but unhinged power source – like a sentient CCTV control centre with the ability to influence every occurrence. You will then have an urban backdrop that approaches Matt Leyshon’s Leddenton and an idea of The Function Room that operates it. I say approaches because I think it’s unlikely that, without Leyshon’s shadowy influence, you’d be able to conceive of anything quite as grim or fiendish.
The stories in the Function Room are by turns unexpected, nauseating, thought-provoking and quirkily inspired. I’d almost go so far as to say there’s a kind of humour at work in the tales, except that at no point did I laugh. Nor did I grin or smirk. These stories force you along a narrowing tunnel of unpleasantness, only to trap you in some forgotten loop of Hadean bowel with no exit.
If horror is about unsettling your reader, about eating away at the foundations of what they hold close and dear, then Leyshon’s work is good horror. Excellent horror, in fact, and Morpheus Tales made a smart decision in publishing his debut collection.
There is a visceral logic to the machinations of The Function Room and its baleful influence reaches into every page of this book.
The stories in the Function Room are by turns unexpected, nauseating, thought-provoking and quirkily inspired. I’d almost go so far as to say there’s a kind of humour at work in the tales, except that at no point did I laugh. Nor did I grin or smirk. These stories force you along a narrowing tunnel of unpleasantness, only to trap you in some forgotten loop of Hadean bowel with no exit.
If horror is about unsettling your reader, about eating away at the foundations of what they hold close and dear, then Leyshon’s work is good horror. Excellent horror, in fact, and Morpheus Tales made a smart decision in publishing his debut collection.
There is a visceral logic to the machinations of The Function Room and its baleful influence reaches into every page of this book.
April 26, 2014
The Function Room: The Kollection is a visceral array of tales, many of which revolve around the Function Room mentioned in the book's very title: a mysterious chamber of grotesque secrets hidden within the old town of Leddenton. The stories will intrigue some while potentially sickening others, as the book's graphic approach may seem excessive to some, but those who enjoy their horror with a double-dose of the horrific have nothing to worry of disappointment here. Much of it is brutal, with a tinge of the unusual, and executed in a classically-styled form, all of which makes for an interesting combination. Matt Leyshon is, I would venture, a unique voice in horror.
November 30, 2022
Not for me. I found the stories kind of obscure, didn’t get some of the references/name dropping in the stories, and was looking for something more fast paced.
January 9, 2021
This text, in fact, seems paradoxically healthy, in tune with my first stated impression that this book reveals a good healthy horror story, gory but cathartic, caricatural but artistic like Bacon. Even ‘clagging sewerage’ has something of the cleansingly sacrificial-Eucharistic.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
November 22, 2022
Oh, what can I say? I thought, oh, this looks a little Miss Marplely, with perhaps a ghoul or two, and the first few pages started off that way. It was a hellride from that point on. Visceral, puts things in the kindest way possible. I was so disturbed, and tried my level best to get out of the this gruesome little villiage, but I always ended back round, and into Function Room. ~ Anna Vizard
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews