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New Meat in a Clean Room
I WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUTI WILL COME BACK AND FILL THIS OUT
93 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 31, 2025
About the author
Joe Koch
77 books160 followersJoe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Their books include THE WINGSPAN OF SEVERED HANDS, CONVULSIVE, INVAGINIES, and THE COUVADE, which received a Shirley Jackson Award nomination in 2019. His short fiction appears in numerous publications such as Vastarien, Southwest Review, PseudoPod, Children of the New Flesh, and The Book of Queer Saints. Joe also co-edited the art horror anthology STORIES OF THE EYE. He/They. Find Joe online at horrorsong.blog and on Twitter @horrorsong.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 11, 2026
Thank you, Void Haus. I needed that.
May 20, 2026
I’m a huge fan of Filthyloot and the anthologies they put out. They’re always strange and boundary-pushing. Despite having multiple contributors, the anthologies have a noticeable VIBE that makes them distinguishable. There are certain authors whose work I feel like i could pick out of a lineup, and I feel that way about Filthyloot’s stuff too.
This anthology, New Meat in a Clean Room, is no different. There’s a couple of authors in here that I love to see over and over in FL publishings — and a couple that were new to me too! Haunting, as always. I love these bad, bad little books.
This anthology, New Meat in a Clean Room, is no different. There’s a couple of authors in here that I love to see over and over in FL publishings — and a couple that were new to me too! Haunting, as always. I love these bad, bad little books.
November 7, 2025
BWAF SINISTER SELECTION
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: A hauntological, post-punk cousin to BodyPunk that swaps viscera-as-argument for city-as-virus. Think Joy Division posters peeling off a damp wall while the TV dinner dings and the moon refuses to answer. It’s moodier, more vaporous, but its best pieces are hypnotic and poisonous.
The editor’s intro reads like a mood board (Ballard, Bacon, No Wave, Joy Division, Cindy Sherman, Gummo, Burroughs) telegraphing a collage aesthetic: hauntology, post-punk, body horror, splatterpunk. That’s exactly what you get, filtered through writers like Edwin Callihan, Sam Richard, Charlene Elsby, Joe Koch, Justin Lutz, Brendan Vidito. Where BodyPunk argued the body, New Meat argues the room that contains it, the media that records it, and the city that eats it. It’s the same family, different pathology.
“Angelhood & Abscission” tracks a newcomer drifting through a brutalist city and a club called Sefer, befriending a maybe-telepath named Bill and a copy-shop Sculptor while reality glitches like a late-night broadcast. Koch’s “I Am A Horse” mutates identity into a bestiary. Richard’s “Red Tears Are Shed on Grey” cross-cuts faceless state violence with a woman’s cigarette-lit anxiety spiral, turning a projector into an accomplice. The POVs share a static charge: lonely narrators trying to stay human while architecture, media, and ritual recode them. Stakes are soft annihilation. Less stabbing, more erasing.
The hauntological machinery is captivating. Callihan’s opener builds a city from television snow and alley neon, then lets the narrator be edited by solicitors, bands, and moons that may be machines. The detail work, such as Sefer’s chrome box band, the copy-shop basement of obsolete machines and hammers, makes the weird feel civic, like zoning laws for dreams. Richard’s story is a tour de force of montage: missiles, erased faces, riots with scraped-clean insignia, and a projector that ejaculates history back onto us; it’s obscene because the news already was. The book’s best trick is taking splatterpunk’s rage and diffusing it into atmosphere without losing teeth.
The collection has cool, narcotic voices; letter-fragments and transcripts; images that repeat until they rot. Callihan’s diction toggles confession and report, puncturing the fog with perfect trash-poetry (“my residency is in a tower of a ruinous castle on the outskirts of eternity”), then undercutting it with deadpan filth. Richard’s camera-eye prose uses repetition like a cudgel, intercutting faceless authority with intimate degradation until causality feels complicit. Elsby again sharpens affect to a blade. Koch’s contribution here leans fable, but the sentences still sweat. Across the board you get tight scene construction and a patient, synth-cold pacing that trusts you to connect the tape splices.
Here we’re interrogating identity as media artifact, surveillance as romance, urban modernity as body plan. Where BodyPunk asked who owns the flesh, New Meat asks who edits the footage. Tech becomes theology, and hauntology becomes grief for futures that never arrived. The horror engine is substitution: faces scraped from film, names replaced by roles, sex replaced by image. The aftertaste is that post-show tinnitus where you can’t tell if the projector is still running somewhere behind you.
Amid 2025’s indie anthologies, this sits in the art-house corner, vibing with Ballardians and noise-kids. As a sister to BodyPunk, it widens the project from flesh to frame, proving Filthy Loot can go philosophical without losing grime.
Less immediate than BodyPunk but stickier the longer it hums in your walls; a beautiful infection in the signal.
Read if you crave club-basement weirdness, can handle narrative static, love city horror that smells like wet concrete.
Skip if you need straight plots, hate collage structure, require cathartic violence over slow erasure.
BWAF Score: 7/10
TL;DR: A hauntological, post-punk cousin to BodyPunk that swaps viscera-as-argument for city-as-virus. Think Joy Division posters peeling off a damp wall while the TV dinner dings and the moon refuses to answer. It’s moodier, more vaporous, but its best pieces are hypnotic and poisonous.
The editor’s intro reads like a mood board (Ballard, Bacon, No Wave, Joy Division, Cindy Sherman, Gummo, Burroughs) telegraphing a collage aesthetic: hauntology, post-punk, body horror, splatterpunk. That’s exactly what you get, filtered through writers like Edwin Callihan, Sam Richard, Charlene Elsby, Joe Koch, Justin Lutz, Brendan Vidito. Where BodyPunk argued the body, New Meat argues the room that contains it, the media that records it, and the city that eats it. It’s the same family, different pathology.
“Angelhood & Abscission” tracks a newcomer drifting through a brutalist city and a club called Sefer, befriending a maybe-telepath named Bill and a copy-shop Sculptor while reality glitches like a late-night broadcast. Koch’s “I Am A Horse” mutates identity into a bestiary. Richard’s “Red Tears Are Shed on Grey” cross-cuts faceless state violence with a woman’s cigarette-lit anxiety spiral, turning a projector into an accomplice. The POVs share a static charge: lonely narrators trying to stay human while architecture, media, and ritual recode them. Stakes are soft annihilation. Less stabbing, more erasing.
The hauntological machinery is captivating. Callihan’s opener builds a city from television snow and alley neon, then lets the narrator be edited by solicitors, bands, and moons that may be machines. The detail work, such as Sefer’s chrome box band, the copy-shop basement of obsolete machines and hammers, makes the weird feel civic, like zoning laws for dreams. Richard’s story is a tour de force of montage: missiles, erased faces, riots with scraped-clean insignia, and a projector that ejaculates history back onto us; it’s obscene because the news already was. The book’s best trick is taking splatterpunk’s rage and diffusing it into atmosphere without losing teeth.
The collection has cool, narcotic voices; letter-fragments and transcripts; images that repeat until they rot. Callihan’s diction toggles confession and report, puncturing the fog with perfect trash-poetry (“my residency is in a tower of a ruinous castle on the outskirts of eternity”), then undercutting it with deadpan filth. Richard’s camera-eye prose uses repetition like a cudgel, intercutting faceless authority with intimate degradation until causality feels complicit. Elsby again sharpens affect to a blade. Koch’s contribution here leans fable, but the sentences still sweat. Across the board you get tight scene construction and a patient, synth-cold pacing that trusts you to connect the tape splices.
Here we’re interrogating identity as media artifact, surveillance as romance, urban modernity as body plan. Where BodyPunk asked who owns the flesh, New Meat asks who edits the footage. Tech becomes theology, and hauntology becomes grief for futures that never arrived. The horror engine is substitution: faces scraped from film, names replaced by roles, sex replaced by image. The aftertaste is that post-show tinnitus where you can’t tell if the projector is still running somewhere behind you.
Amid 2025’s indie anthologies, this sits in the art-house corner, vibing with Ballardians and noise-kids. As a sister to BodyPunk, it widens the project from flesh to frame, proving Filthy Loot can go philosophical without losing grime.
Less immediate than BodyPunk but stickier the longer it hums in your walls; a beautiful infection in the signal.
Read if you crave club-basement weirdness, can handle narrative static, love city horror that smells like wet concrete.
Skip if you need straight plots, hate collage structure, require cathartic violence over slow erasure.
September 21, 2025
I snagged a copy of this from the publisher at a recent con. All views and opinions are my own.
-
New Meat in a Clean Room, a title that immediately causes a multitude of wild and terrible scenarios to spring to mind. For me, picking a copy of this book was a no-brainer. This is one of a handful of volumes I can easily point to, for folks who have yet to experience the storycraft of Edwin Callihan, Sam Richard, Charlene Elsby, Joe Koch, Justin Lutz and Brendan Vidito.
As I said before, the title of this collection will immediately cause your brain to spring forth with all sorts odd and lurid images. None of which will probably come close to what the assembled authors present in their respective stories. Editor and Publisher par excellence, Ira Rat, does include a brief Introduction, giving the reader a glimpse at the inspiration and ideaspace that brought this book together. Something akin to "here's the tool I had right before I invited my friends over, with their tools too, to build a club house". Whether you are happily familiar with the writing of the respective authors, or coming to this book as the proverbial new meat , fresh faced and full of hope. In either case, New Meat will take you places, lead you down new pathways of imagination and fear. I loved every page of this book, and look forward to reading what is going to erupt next from the craniums of these incredibly talented, and twisted authors. When things get Weird, The Weird write stories like these !
-
New Meat in a Clean Room, a title that immediately causes a multitude of wild and terrible scenarios to spring to mind. For me, picking a copy of this book was a no-brainer. This is one of a handful of volumes I can easily point to, for folks who have yet to experience the storycraft of Edwin Callihan, Sam Richard, Charlene Elsby, Joe Koch, Justin Lutz and Brendan Vidito.
As I said before, the title of this collection will immediately cause your brain to spring forth with all sorts odd and lurid images. None of which will probably come close to what the assembled authors present in their respective stories. Editor and Publisher par excellence, Ira Rat, does include a brief Introduction, giving the reader a glimpse at the inspiration and ideaspace that brought this book together. Something akin to "here's the tool I had right before I invited my friends over, with their tools too, to build a club house". Whether you are happily familiar with the writing of the respective authors, or coming to this book as the proverbial new meat , fresh faced and full of hope. In either case, New Meat will take you places, lead you down new pathways of imagination and fear. I loved every page of this book, and look forward to reading what is going to erupt next from the craniums of these incredibly talented, and twisted authors. When things get Weird, The Weird write stories like these !
October 27, 2025
A literary weird fiction collection (I wouldn’t call any of these “horror” really but that’s just me) by some amazing writers. I was already familiar with Elsby and Koch (who continue to stun here) but I also now know of authors like Lutz and Richard who had some highlights for me.
Cyber punk post punk body terror morbidity spikes most of these tales. It’s a quick read. The artwork and layout rocks. My first time buying from Filthy Loot and won’t be my last (starting Body Punk NOW).
Cyber punk post punk body terror morbidity spikes most of these tales. It’s a quick read. The artwork and layout rocks. My first time buying from Filthy Loot and won’t be my last (starting Body Punk NOW).
Read
November 8, 2025I'm Not Coming After Her by Charlene Elsby is not just my favorite short stories in this collection, but one of my favorite short stories I've read all year!
March 23, 2026
The six stories here are all excellent modern horror. A highly recommended quick read.
May 28, 2026
Once again, since this is an anthology, my overall rating is the average of my ratings of each individual story.
Angelhood & Abscission (1 star): Put simply, this story was just plain boring to me. It didn't really make me *feel* anything as a reader, and I continued to wonder when things would get interesting. Spoiler alert...they never really did get interesting. Additionally, since this was the story that started off the whole book itself, I found myself asking, "Am I actually reading what I thought I was advertised? Is this actually a body horror/splatterpunk book?" All in all, this initial story was disappointing.
Red Tears are Shed on Grey (1 star): Just like the first story, I was so bored while reading this. I really did not understand what the "why" or purpose was of this story. It felt like I was just reading some random piece of writing; it didn't fit the vibe of most of the other stories. I will admit, though, there were some interesting aspects! For example, I loved how Richard created a motif of film throughout the whole story, as I thought it added a cool layer to the overall atmosphere/tone of the story.
I'm Not Coming After Her (2 stars): I think this concept is really interesting! It was definitely something very different, which I appreciated. Additionally, I thought that there was a good amount of "buildup" and mystery leading up to the climax of the book. That being said, I also thought that there was just not enough depth. I wish there would have been some more character and/or world building to help readers become more invested and involved in the story. In other words, the scope of the story felt limited and it caused the story to feel dry and one-sided.
I Am a Horse (4 stars): What the actual fuck. Let me note really quick that the reason I didn't rate this story a full 5 stars is because I just didn't understand the conclusion. Maybe I'm a moron but I was left wondering, "cool story bro but what was the point?" But, did this story make me extremely uncomfortable? Yes. Did it keep me on edge? Yeah. Do I want many others to read it so that we can discuss just how messed up it is? You bet your ass I do.
Not Waving, but Drowning (5 stars): Two words: CHEF'S. KISS! This story was simple, beautifully written, and captivating. I have absolutely nothing negative to say about this story it was just...MWAH.
Theatre of Sublimation (5 stars): How do people come up with this shit?! This story idea was so creative I can't even explain how impressed I was. Every single aspect of this story was perfect...10s across the board! This story held me captive until the very end, and even now I can't stop thinking about it. I really wish that this world and concept was a whole book on its own because I'm left wanting to know more.
Angelhood & Abscission (1 star): Put simply, this story was just plain boring to me. It didn't really make me *feel* anything as a reader, and I continued to wonder when things would get interesting. Spoiler alert...they never really did get interesting. Additionally, since this was the story that started off the whole book itself, I found myself asking, "Am I actually reading what I thought I was advertised? Is this actually a body horror/splatterpunk book?" All in all, this initial story was disappointing.
Red Tears are Shed on Grey (1 star): Just like the first story, I was so bored while reading this. I really did not understand what the "why" or purpose was of this story. It felt like I was just reading some random piece of writing; it didn't fit the vibe of most of the other stories. I will admit, though, there were some interesting aspects! For example, I loved how Richard created a motif of film throughout the whole story, as I thought it added a cool layer to the overall atmosphere/tone of the story.
I'm Not Coming After Her (2 stars): I think this concept is really interesting! It was definitely something very different, which I appreciated. Additionally, I thought that there was a good amount of "buildup" and mystery leading up to the climax of the book. That being said, I also thought that there was just not enough depth. I wish there would have been some more character and/or world building to help readers become more invested and involved in the story. In other words, the scope of the story felt limited and it caused the story to feel dry and one-sided.
I Am a Horse (4 stars): What the actual fuck. Let me note really quick that the reason I didn't rate this story a full 5 stars is because I just didn't understand the conclusion. Maybe I'm a moron but I was left wondering, "cool story bro but what was the point?" But, did this story make me extremely uncomfortable? Yes. Did it keep me on edge? Yeah. Do I want many others to read it so that we can discuss just how messed up it is? You bet your ass I do.
Not Waving, but Drowning (5 stars): Two words: CHEF'S. KISS! This story was simple, beautifully written, and captivating. I have absolutely nothing negative to say about this story it was just...MWAH.
Theatre of Sublimation (5 stars): How do people come up with this shit?! This story idea was so creative I can't even explain how impressed I was. Every single aspect of this story was perfect...10s across the board! This story held me captive until the very end, and even now I can't stop thinking about it. I really wish that this world and concept was a whole book on its own because I'm left wanting to know more.
April 23, 2026
3.50 stars
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews