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Excitable Boys
They are all around us. That thin guy with glasses who sat beside you on the train and didn't look at you when you said hello? He was one of them.
The chubby guy, chain-smoking on the steps of the courthouse. You thought he was a lawyer. He was one of them too.
The man with the beard who laughed too loudly in the theatre? You're lucky you didn't tell him to shut up...
You pass them in the street and you don't look twice. Why should you? They look normal. Friendly even. One of them may have served you dinner today, washed your car, painted your house.
And you never suspected a thing. Scared yet? You should be.
Wish you knew what they were thinking? Wish you knew the minds coiled behind those pretty faces?
Seven stories. Seven glimpses into seven twisted brains. Seven chances to prepare yourself for their coming.
What's a propeller job? What are cheese graters really good for? Where do the worms go?
All these question, and more, answered in... Excitable Boys.
The chubby guy, chain-smoking on the steps of the courthouse. You thought he was a lawyer. He was one of them too.
The man with the beard who laughed too loudly in the theatre? You're lucky you didn't tell him to shut up...
You pass them in the street and you don't look twice. Why should you? They look normal. Friendly even. One of them may have served you dinner today, washed your car, painted your house.
And you never suspected a thing. Scared yet? You should be.
Wish you knew what they were thinking? Wish you knew the minds coiled behind those pretty faces?
Seven stories. Seven glimpses into seven twisted brains. Seven chances to prepare yourself for their coming.
What's a propeller job? What are cheese graters really good for? Where do the worms go?
All these question, and more, answered in... Excitable Boys.
- GenresHorror
135 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2002
71 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 4, 2009
Published back in 2002 by Freak Press, ‘Excitable Boys’ is a collection of the most repulsive and damn right sick stories to thrill the tastes of those who seek such literature. Compiled and edited by Kelly Laymon (none other than Richard Laymon’s daughter), the idea for the book was the brain child of Kelly’s after hearing Ryan Harding’s 2000 entry in the World Horror Convention Gross-Out Contest. The name for the compilation came from Warren Zevon’s song entitled ‘Excitable Boy’. Sharing similar themes and subject matters, the title seemed somewhat appropriate to Kelly.
The book kicks off with a short introduction from Kelly, entitled ‘Take a Tour Through the Sewer’, where she details how and why ‘Excitable Boys’ came about. This four page introduction is an amusing little read and certainly does a good job in whetting the appetite for the tales to come.
First up is Rain Graves’s twenty-three page short entitled ‘Good Care’. Rain delivers an unnerving tale of inter-family revenge after a boy’s father unfairly punishes him for his ‘insolence’ in the most horrific of ways. As you would guess, the father eventually gets his comeuppance. The story is a good little tale to get the book underway, delivering a sufficient amount of descriptive gore and a general teeth-grinding underlying atmosphere.
Next up is Michael McCarty’s suitably grim short entitled ‘The Constipated Cannibal’. This super-short, three page tale is preluded by a rather grotesque illustration by Gak depicting what one would imagine would be the end result of a ‘constipated cannibal’. Not a pleasant site!
This delightfully detailed description of a cannibal’s troublesome bowel movements is wonderfully unpleasant with a well needed slab of comedy curdling the foulness that surrounds this general premise. This is what ‘Excitable Boy’s’ is all about!
Following on from that in the only way these authors know how is Edward Lee with his thirty-four page short entitled ‘The McCrath Model SS40-C, Series S’. This charming tale delivers to the writing world what Hideshi Hino’s film ‘Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood’ did to the world of motion picture.
Centred around the monstrous evil unleashed by a doctor and his helpers on his two victims, this particularly disturbing tale is possibly the strongest of the entire collection. Heavily charged with sexual behaviour, torture and mutilation, Lee’s contribution is sure to please all those who decide to pick up a copy of this book.
None other than the author Brian Keene takes to the stage next with his surreal short entitled ‘Full of It’. This twelve page story involves a group of ex-soldiers who have taken it upon themselves to form a terrorist organisation named ‘The Sons of the Constitution’. We join the tale as they capture a solider who is spying on the group. But their subsequent entrapment and torture of the soldier backfires somewhat when a shocking turn of events lays waste to the entire group.
This surreal tale is waste deep in its unrelenting assault on the reader. Keene delivers a foul story with his tongue firmly in cheek approach to what can only be described as a childishly comical grand finale. For the gross out factor, you won’t be disappointed with this one.
Typical of Mark McLaughlin. The next entry in the collection is McLaughlin’s short entitled ‘Attack Of The Fifty-Foot Prison Bitch’. You can always tell when it’s one of McLaughlin’s tales by the ridiculous B-Movie-esque title to the work. With his usual, all out surreal and unashamedly crude nature, Mark brings us this self-explanatory titled tale which delivers the all important message that ‘radioactivity and prisoners just don’t mix’. The mistake was made here, with diabolical and typically revolting consequences.
You know what you’re getting with a Mark McLaughlin story, so expect the usual surreal, comical, ridiculous and crude, in your face and monstrously over the top b-movie plot line crammed into the least amount of pages possible for such an epic title. This is a non-stop thrill of a ride.
Coming along next is Gavin Williams’s truly twisted contribution by the name of ‘A Heart Full Of Love, A Bowel Full Of Hate’. This six page abomination is nothing short of all out foul. The short starts off with the opening sentence “I knew things were going from bad to worse when live beetles started to pour out of my grandmama’s anus”. From here on Williams unleashes an onslaught of non-stop gut-churning gore with its one and only mission – to gross out the reader from start to finish. And doesn’t the man do that well! Expect a barrage of depravities that Williams has dug up from deep within his obviously twisted imagination.
Following on from that, with the mood of the compilation now firmly set in its place we have Ryan Harding’s memorable (in all the wrong or right ways, depending on your outlook) short entitled ‘Genital Grinder: A Snuff Film in Five Acts’. With a title which was probably taken from the Carcass track that appeared on their 1988 album ‘Reek Of Putrefaction’, you can already guess at the level of splatter that’s going to be involved here. This eighteen page short tells the tale of two ambitious film makers who take on the mission of filming a snuff movie.
Outrageously gory and heavily ladled with black comedy, Harding brings to ‘Excitable Boys’ another wave of monumental gross-out fun that is one of those shorts that lingers in the back of your mind for a few weeks afterwards.
Last but by no means least we have Geoff Cooper’s short and sweet entry ‘Just Like Chicken’. This five page contribution is recalling a particularly horrible event that took place at the annual Gross-Out contest at World Horror in Denver. Yep, that’s right, a true story to end the book on! And what a little story it is too. Ever seen Herb Robins’s 1977 film ‘The Worm Eaters’? Well, here you get the written rendition in all its nauseating glory!
The book is illustrated throughout (one illustration per story) by Gak, along with a brief passage on each author. This is 135 pages of pure gross-out fun, is put together in a nice little book that is sure to bring a chuckle to almost all lovers of gory splatterpunk pulp. If you’ve read this far, then this is a book for you!
The book kicks off with a short introduction from Kelly, entitled ‘Take a Tour Through the Sewer’, where she details how and why ‘Excitable Boys’ came about. This four page introduction is an amusing little read and certainly does a good job in whetting the appetite for the tales to come.
First up is Rain Graves’s twenty-three page short entitled ‘Good Care’. Rain delivers an unnerving tale of inter-family revenge after a boy’s father unfairly punishes him for his ‘insolence’ in the most horrific of ways. As you would guess, the father eventually gets his comeuppance. The story is a good little tale to get the book underway, delivering a sufficient amount of descriptive gore and a general teeth-grinding underlying atmosphere.
Next up is Michael McCarty’s suitably grim short entitled ‘The Constipated Cannibal’. This super-short, three page tale is preluded by a rather grotesque illustration by Gak depicting what one would imagine would be the end result of a ‘constipated cannibal’. Not a pleasant site!
This delightfully detailed description of a cannibal’s troublesome bowel movements is wonderfully unpleasant with a well needed slab of comedy curdling the foulness that surrounds this general premise. This is what ‘Excitable Boy’s’ is all about!
Following on from that in the only way these authors know how is Edward Lee with his thirty-four page short entitled ‘The McCrath Model SS40-C, Series S’. This charming tale delivers to the writing world what Hideshi Hino’s film ‘Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood’ did to the world of motion picture.
Centred around the monstrous evil unleashed by a doctor and his helpers on his two victims, this particularly disturbing tale is possibly the strongest of the entire collection. Heavily charged with sexual behaviour, torture and mutilation, Lee’s contribution is sure to please all those who decide to pick up a copy of this book.
None other than the author Brian Keene takes to the stage next with his surreal short entitled ‘Full of It’. This twelve page story involves a group of ex-soldiers who have taken it upon themselves to form a terrorist organisation named ‘The Sons of the Constitution’. We join the tale as they capture a solider who is spying on the group. But their subsequent entrapment and torture of the soldier backfires somewhat when a shocking turn of events lays waste to the entire group.
This surreal tale is waste deep in its unrelenting assault on the reader. Keene delivers a foul story with his tongue firmly in cheek approach to what can only be described as a childishly comical grand finale. For the gross out factor, you won’t be disappointed with this one.
Typical of Mark McLaughlin. The next entry in the collection is McLaughlin’s short entitled ‘Attack Of The Fifty-Foot Prison Bitch’. You can always tell when it’s one of McLaughlin’s tales by the ridiculous B-Movie-esque title to the work. With his usual, all out surreal and unashamedly crude nature, Mark brings us this self-explanatory titled tale which delivers the all important message that ‘radioactivity and prisoners just don’t mix’. The mistake was made here, with diabolical and typically revolting consequences.
You know what you’re getting with a Mark McLaughlin story, so expect the usual surreal, comical, ridiculous and crude, in your face and monstrously over the top b-movie plot line crammed into the least amount of pages possible for such an epic title. This is a non-stop thrill of a ride.
Coming along next is Gavin Williams’s truly twisted contribution by the name of ‘A Heart Full Of Love, A Bowel Full Of Hate’. This six page abomination is nothing short of all out foul. The short starts off with the opening sentence “I knew things were going from bad to worse when live beetles started to pour out of my grandmama’s anus”. From here on Williams unleashes an onslaught of non-stop gut-churning gore with its one and only mission – to gross out the reader from start to finish. And doesn’t the man do that well! Expect a barrage of depravities that Williams has dug up from deep within his obviously twisted imagination.
Following on from that, with the mood of the compilation now firmly set in its place we have Ryan Harding’s memorable (in all the wrong or right ways, depending on your outlook) short entitled ‘Genital Grinder: A Snuff Film in Five Acts’. With a title which was probably taken from the Carcass track that appeared on their 1988 album ‘Reek Of Putrefaction’, you can already guess at the level of splatter that’s going to be involved here. This eighteen page short tells the tale of two ambitious film makers who take on the mission of filming a snuff movie.
Outrageously gory and heavily ladled with black comedy, Harding brings to ‘Excitable Boys’ another wave of monumental gross-out fun that is one of those shorts that lingers in the back of your mind for a few weeks afterwards.
Last but by no means least we have Geoff Cooper’s short and sweet entry ‘Just Like Chicken’. This five page contribution is recalling a particularly horrible event that took place at the annual Gross-Out contest at World Horror in Denver. Yep, that’s right, a true story to end the book on! And what a little story it is too. Ever seen Herb Robins’s 1977 film ‘The Worm Eaters’? Well, here you get the written rendition in all its nauseating glory!
The book is illustrated throughout (one illustration per story) by Gak, along with a brief passage on each author. This is 135 pages of pure gross-out fun, is put together in a nice little book that is sure to bring a chuckle to almost all lovers of gory splatterpunk pulp. If you’ve read this far, then this is a book for you!
September 9, 2011
This is a smallish collection of gross-out stories. Take this as a warning as well as a description. That is not a euphemism for "really funny jokes about farts" though there are some. Despite the horror writers involved, don't even quite assume horror (your mileage may vary). Gross-out.
But What Could Doug Mean by This?
One story has a father so abusive that his son prefers the anal rape to worse tortures. Another has got maggots coming out of a penis after they were inserted there for a snuff/porn film's money shot. We got a cannibal constipated because he, apparently, ate a couple of late term aborted fetuses too fast. You got Edward Lee. Who wrote a story. Is that not enough to make you wince? Then you probably need to read either Header or Bighead. Just for now, though, let's say his story involves people stapled at the mouth and forced to play, for lack of a better term, "swallow it good...or drown" [I know what you're thinking, why hasn't this game ever been on Minute to Win It? Boggles the mind...]. Hey, it even predates Human Centipede! Take that, Tom Six!
The whole shebang is so prone to feces and festering wounds that when you get Brian Keene's mash-up of the Blob, and EC Comics story, and a poo monster: you feel relieved. It's not so bad. People got poop in their mouth, crushed to death by by yellow tendrils of maggots and human waste, and that's ok. Because it's better. Which is to say it could be worse. At least the people are kind of bad guys. I swear you to...you will root for the shitbogrevengestink.
This is the first book in a month, I think, that I have ranked with more than three stars. What does that say about me? What does that say about the book? Nothing much in either case. This book is what it is, about 200 pages of stories that you might tell your friends to see who taps out first. If you don't like it, whatever the word "like" means in that case, it is inconsequential enough to put down and not regret not finishing. Assuming you do not have a weak stomach and need to take breaks, you can probably finished in about an hour. You get humor, depravity, and maybe a little bit of hope (in, like, two of the stories) all rolled around in a great big stinky wad. Hell, it even tends to rape/torture/mutilate equally across genders, body-types, and age groups. That's progress.
On a technical side, plot structure and rhythm and such, the stories range from ok to poor. Ed Lee's story was amazingly well balanced for it to be the one that got me closest to being nauseated. Brian Keene's has characters you can identify with. Rain Graves's opener actually is a full on story, has a point and development and everything, as well as some experiments in style, but feels like a small snippet of a larger picture that is actually too bright and cheery for the rest of this book (also is probably the darkest story, as well, which you'll just have to read to understand what I mean).
Of the rest, Ryan Harding's "Genital Grinder", about a couple of half-wits staging their own snuff film, is probably the key tale. By that time, though, I think my brain had shut off because there was only one bit in that that my brain even registered. The rest are fun enough.
Stories also range from surreal to slightly more traditional. Gavin Williams dishes out a flat out bizarro world. McLauglin's story is in an odd sex parody of 1950s glam, with a more constrained weirdness. Geoff Cooper's [presumably non-fictional] entry is full on real world.
Editing is kind of ok, but occasionally breaks [unexpected paragraphs, misspellings, some weird word choices and odd lines]. Artwork ranges from awesome to adequate. Some of the author bios are fun, some are advertisements.
All told, a fun book to borrow from a friend and give it a whirl. Or, maybe, a way to trick your friends (and guarantee they never trust you again). To end it, I'll star it off with the opening line of Gavin Williams's story: "I knew things were going from bad to worse when live beetles started to pour out of my grandmama’s anus."
GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY!
But What Could Doug Mean by This?
One story has a father so abusive that his son prefers the anal rape to worse tortures. Another has got maggots coming out of a penis after they were inserted there for a snuff/porn film's money shot. We got a cannibal constipated because he, apparently, ate a couple of late term aborted fetuses too fast. You got Edward Lee. Who wrote a story. Is that not enough to make you wince? Then you probably need to read either Header or Bighead. Just for now, though, let's say his story involves people stapled at the mouth and forced to play, for lack of a better term, "swallow it good...or drown" [I know what you're thinking, why hasn't this game ever been on Minute to Win It? Boggles the mind...]. Hey, it even predates Human Centipede! Take that, Tom Six!
The whole shebang is so prone to feces and festering wounds that when you get Brian Keene's mash-up of the Blob, and EC Comics story, and a poo monster: you feel relieved. It's not so bad. People got poop in their mouth, crushed to death by by yellow tendrils of maggots and human waste, and that's ok. Because it's better. Which is to say it could be worse. At least the people are kind of bad guys. I swear you to...you will root for the shitbogrevengestink.
This is the first book in a month, I think, that I have ranked with more than three stars. What does that say about me? What does that say about the book? Nothing much in either case. This book is what it is, about 200 pages of stories that you might tell your friends to see who taps out first. If you don't like it, whatever the word "like" means in that case, it is inconsequential enough to put down and not regret not finishing. Assuming you do not have a weak stomach and need to take breaks, you can probably finished in about an hour. You get humor, depravity, and maybe a little bit of hope (in, like, two of the stories) all rolled around in a great big stinky wad. Hell, it even tends to rape/torture/mutilate equally across genders, body-types, and age groups. That's progress.
On a technical side, plot structure and rhythm and such, the stories range from ok to poor. Ed Lee's story was amazingly well balanced for it to be the one that got me closest to being nauseated. Brian Keene's has characters you can identify with. Rain Graves's opener actually is a full on story, has a point and development and everything, as well as some experiments in style, but feels like a small snippet of a larger picture that is actually too bright and cheery for the rest of this book (also is probably the darkest story, as well, which you'll just have to read to understand what I mean).
Of the rest, Ryan Harding's "Genital Grinder", about a couple of half-wits staging their own snuff film, is probably the key tale. By that time, though, I think my brain had shut off because there was only one bit in that that my brain even registered. The rest are fun enough.
Stories also range from surreal to slightly more traditional. Gavin Williams dishes out a flat out bizarro world. McLauglin's story is in an odd sex parody of 1950s glam, with a more constrained weirdness. Geoff Cooper's [presumably non-fictional] entry is full on real world.
Editing is kind of ok, but occasionally breaks [unexpected paragraphs, misspellings, some weird word choices and odd lines]. Artwork ranges from awesome to adequate. Some of the author bios are fun, some are advertisements.
All told, a fun book to borrow from a friend and give it a whirl. Or, maybe, a way to trick your friends (and guarantee they never trust you again). To end it, I'll star it off with the opening line of Gavin Williams's story: "I knew things were going from bad to worse when live beetles started to pour out of my grandmama’s anus."
GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY!
June 3, 2022
Inspired by the World Horror Convention's Gross-Out Contest, a collection of stories attempting to be the most depraved and sickest examples on offer, most of them far too obsessed with the anus, which is perhaps more telling than intended.
Maybe I'm too old, too jaded, but there's little here above the puerile—justifying the book at least its title—and very little that actually struck me as worthy; worse examples could be found judiciously elsewhere in the genre, and in novels possibly used to better effect.
Maybe I'm too old, too jaded, but there's little here above the puerile—justifying the book at least its title—and very little that actually struck me as worthy; worse examples could be found judiciously elsewhere in the genre, and in novels possibly used to better effect.
February 8, 2017
Excitable Boys is just a ridiculous book, but if you like humor, this might appeal to you. For me, I should have known, as the description of the book was for "The authors to try to come up with the grossest story, that the author could think of." I'm pretty sure this competition was taken from an awards show (Stoker's maybe?), and then placed in book form.
Anyway, as expected, the butt and feces were common themes, and were in almost all of the stories. So, after reading the first two stories I said: "okay, this is just ridiculous," and I then decided to only finish reading the authors that I usually read. So, I left this book incomplete, and I'm glad that I did. I purchased it because it has some authors that I like to read, like Brian Keene and Geoff Cooper. But even these guys’ stories couldn't prevent me from losing brain cells, by reading this. Sorry, but this was not for me.
Anyway, as expected, the butt and feces were common themes, and were in almost all of the stories. So, after reading the first two stories I said: "okay, this is just ridiculous," and I then decided to only finish reading the authors that I usually read. So, I left this book incomplete, and I'm glad that I did. I purchased it because it has some authors that I like to read, like Brian Keene and Geoff Cooper. But even these guys’ stories couldn't prevent me from losing brain cells, by reading this. Sorry, but this was not for me.
October 28, 2015
In memory of Richard Laymon this book is a gem. The best in horror went above and beyond to write some of the grossest and grotesque horror since the splatterpunk days.
June 18, 2011
Kelly Laymon published my twisted little tale "The Constipated Cannibal" which is now being reprinted in A HELL OF A JOB
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