Records of the Hightower Massacre

by L. Andrew Cooper, Maeva Wunn

THEY WILL CORRECT YOU… ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

HC3, the Hightower Course Correction Center, “recruits” LGBTQ+ people to participate in a program that will help them get the jobs they need to survive in the dystopic conditions of AMCONS City, center of a post-American territory run by a fascistic military. All they have to do is adopt cisgender, heterosexual identities. Ash, who is black, non-binary, and asexual, meets Aubrey, a white, trans, gay man, at a job fair where they face rejection after rejection… until they get recruited. They wind up in a converted slaughterhouse where the people in charge use brutal conditioning methods as well as the ghastliest forms of torture and murder imaginable to “help” newly recruited prisoners.

#1 Amazon bestselling horror writer L. Andrew Cooper and superlative dark poet Maeva Wunn team up to deliver a fast-paced, horrific ride into the depths of human depravity as Ash and Aubrey tell their tale. While the terrors are intense, characters propel the Ash and Aubrey form a core of friends within the program who resist and, eventually, learn to fight back.

Genres: Horror, LGBT

174 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 12, 2024

About the author

L. Andrew Cooper specializes in the provocative, scary, and strange. His current project, The Middle Reaches, is a serialized epic of weird horror and dark fantasy on Amazon Kindle Vella. His latest release, Records of the Hightower Massacre, an LGBTQ+ horror novella co-authored with Maeva Wunn, imagines a near-future dystopia where anti-queer hate runs a program to "correct" deviants. Stains of Atrocity, his newest collection of stories, goes to uncomfortable psychological and visceral extremes. His latest novel, Crazy Time, combines literary horror and dark fantasy in a contemporary quest to undo what may be a divine curse. Other published works include novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines; short story collections Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum; poetry collection The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick; non-fiction Gothic Realities and Dario Argento; co-edited fiction anthologies Imagination Reimagined and Reel Dark; and the co-edited textbook Monsters. He has also written more than 30 award-winning screenplays. After studying literature and film at Harvard and Princeton, he used his Ph.D. to teach about favorite topics from coast to coast in the United States. He now focuses on writing and lives with his husband in North Hollywood, California. Find him at www.landrewcooper.com.

Reviews

[Stitching Ghost · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had a lot of potential, but the end result felt rushed and forced.

[corks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book but eh— didn’t work out that way. I wish GR had half stars cause this would’ve been a 2.5 lmao

Half of the book I was offended and the other half I was bored and when the ending came I was just shook to my core that’s what we got…

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Contemporary horror will often reflect the political landscape, and Records of the Hightower Massacre is a great example of this. In the not too distant future, the United States has been broken up, books have been banned, and jobs are scarce if you aren't cisgender and heterosexual. Chapter by chapter, we get the alternating statements of the two main characters, Ash and Aubrey, who have been recruited into a program made for "people like them".

This is an engaging, quick read, with a few descriptions of very graphic violence. I found the majority of the situations to be believable, unfortunately, save for one near the end that just didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book, although there is what I suppose is a hint towards it in the first couple of chapters. I felt like it was put in there to quickly get the characters out of a dire situation. Throwing a supernatural instance into a book that didn't have any prior to that took me out of the story.

I really appreciate the recent surge of books by LGBTQIA+ authors, and think that they are a much needed voice in the horror genre, so thumbs up for that!

[Richie Cheese · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually ended up liking this book a lot more than I thought I was going to. The beginning of the book has a rough start, but once it reaches the main plot the ball starts rolling and really reads like a horror movie filled with commentary. I will stay that the commentary is a little too on the nose that it takes away from some moments towards the end, but that didn't necessarily ruin anything I read. Overall it is something I would recommend to ppl that want some queer horror.

[K.C. Norton]

I didn’t feel like this book had anything new to say, and I struggled to remember which character was narrating as I was reading. The prose was bland and vague, and while I love queer horror, I didn’t feel like this one covered any new ground. Like, the real monster is compulsory heteronormativity. I can get behind that. But the characters didn’t say or do anything to make themselves distinct, there was a lot of telling rather than showing, and the authors seem to have no awareness of the concept of intersectionality.

I didn’t hate this, but I didn’t feel much of anything else about it, either. I won this from a Goodreads giveaway and have decided not to rate it since I didn’t care for it, but don’t have any real desire to drag the ratings even further down. DNF at 43% because I’m not going to read about characters discussing sexual violence when there’s this little nuance and emotion involved. Not for me.

[Brandon Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark stuff

An alternative world that Terrifyingly is not out of the realms of possibility. There is some dark stuff here which I don't want to ruin.

It's a cautionary tale but the "final boss" feels tacked on and shoehorned in which hurts the whole final act bringing it down a star. Still an interesting if unsettling read.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.8⭐s
-
I don't know how to feel about this book because I really wanted it to be good; I was so excited, so it sucks that I ended up disappointed. 😭
I felt no connections to either the main character or the side character.
This book had so much potential to be a really good book.

[Caleb Cochrane-Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the most fucked up book i think I’ve ever read but could not put it down. 3 stars because I’m traumatized.

[Camilla Christensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

1,5

[Espen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm speechless