Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Flayed Corpse and Other Stories

Rate this book
Flayed Corpse and Other Stories contains more than two dozen of examples of Simmons’s deft voice and vision. The individual stories in Flayed Corpse stand on their own as minimasterpieces of skin-crawling terror, but collectively complement each other in a way that only heightens the anxiety and dread pouring from page to page. Flayed Corpse also collects several collaborations between Simmons and other cartoonists, including James Romberger, Anders Nilsen, Tara Booth, Eroyn Franklin, Tom Van Deusen, and Eric Reynolds, amongst others.

180 pages, Hardcover

First published March 27, 2018

4 people are currently reading
162 people want to read

About the author

Josh Simmons

42 books65 followers

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
33 (14%)
4 stars
82 (35%)
3 stars
74 (32%)
2 stars
31 (13%)
1 star
10 (4%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews
Profile Image for Sam Quixote.
4,801 reviews13.4k followers
July 30, 2018
Flayed Corpse and Other Stories is a decent anthology of horror comics mostly by Josh Simmons.

I enjoyed the two longest stories here, the best one being The Incident at Owl’s Head where a drifter is taken in by a gay weirdo called Ambrose who seems to run the small town and everyone’s in thrall to. I read the Ambrose Bierce short story An Occurrence at Owl’s Creek Bridge years ago but I can’t remember what happened in it so I’m not sure why this story is referencing it or what similarities it shares.

Still, the atmosphere is pleasantly creepy, there are some imaginative and unsettling scenes - the drifter seemingly melting into the bookshop’s floor for no reason and Ambrose’s gross eating habits - and it was unpredictable. Good stuff!

The other story I liked was a Batman and Joker pastiche. “Batman” and “Joker” make their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape (that Joker probably brought about) and Batman is searching for survivors while bringing Joker along as his prisoner. Except Joker goes too far, snaps Batman’s already-fragile mind and shit gets crazy!

You don’t have to be a Batman fan to enjoy that one but I think if you are then you’ll like it more (assuming you have a sense of humour!). It’s very silly and amusing and, again, I had no clue where it was headed either as it was so off-the-rails bonkers.

Some of the humour of the other stories was too juvenile (“The Great Shitter” about a giant monster that literally shits continuously on a town) and a lot of the stories were flatly unoriginal (“psycho killer menacing isolated people” was a trope that came up several times). But while the majority of the stories were either completely throwaway or unmemorable, they’re at least readable and the varied art is interesting.

Flayed Corpse and Other Stories is no must-read anthology but, if you’re into horror comics, you’ll probably find something entertaining here.
Profile Image for Dave Schaafsma.
Author 6 books32.1k followers
August 23, 2018
If you want to make a speech at the American Legion or after your Sunday church service on The Evils Preying on Youth Today, you can do no worse than to wave in the faces of your crowd a copy of Flayed Corpse done by Josh Simmons and his snickering nihilist buddies. I’m generally not a fan of Simmons’s work; it crosses some lines for me in places, so this I know means I am no longer in line to be hip. The point of his work is horror for humor, (which of course has a long tradition, including Hitchcock’s Psycho); this collection features a range of his work and some collaborative “projects” along the lines of his typical “aesthetic.” He’s in part looking back to a fifties and sixties pulp tradition that ushered in The Comics Code back in that day, “shock” (but is it even possible, anymore?) value for fun. As Fantagraphics trumpets on the back cover, “at the crossroads of abomination and hilarity.” Okay, some of you will like it, but for some reason it annoys me.

But much of the work here is at the level of arrested juvenilia: defecation, vomiting, decapitation, family slaughter, ho hum.

I like the impulse to collaboration—almost democratic for a nihilist, there, Josh--but unfortunately most of these are not remarkable except in that they show how they are all playing around with a set of ideas. I give the collection a star for this impulse alone, up from 2 stars. He's working within a tradition, I'll admit.

One longer one has some more substance, I suppose. “The Incident at Owl’s Head” features a killer named Ambrose who takes in drifters. Ambrose Bierce wrote “An Occurrence at Owl’s Creek” (which has a shock ending) but these “clues” are just part of an anti-literary joke as far as I can tell, as nothing that happens seems to really surprise or have anything to do with that story. It’s like giving you the literary clue to read Macbeth in order to understand this review, ha ha, gotcha. (I will revise this review if you show me I am wrong; I have not read the story in a long time).

I like one of his Batman comics included here, "Twilight of the Bat,” but otherwise there’s not much of interest. One curious thing is that there is very little sex in the volume. There is one story one might find misogynistic, maybe, but on the whole he stays clear of offending women here. A couple of his collaborators are even women. In other Simmons works he doesn’t mind the abuse of women (The Furry Trap, ugh). Cleaning up the act, Josh? Getting tame in your old age?

But now that I think of it, you don’t need to worry that youth will get corrupted with this comic. It’s not so much evil as kinda boring.
Profile Image for Plagued by Visions.
218 reviews816 followers
June 20, 2023
Images are such an effective tool for transgression because they detonate sublime and appalling ideas without the same risk words run at explaining themselves too much. Sight is enough to feel the dread!
Profile Image for Brian O'Connell.
371 reviews63 followers
May 27, 2019
Another thrillingly disturbing collection from Josh Simmons. Themes of toxic masculinity, existential horror, mental and emotional cataclysm, and the selfishness and brutality of man are explored through an eclectic series of funny/horrifying vignettes. While there's nothing *quite* on the level of horror that "Cockbone" (from Simmons' last collection) reached, the collection is absolutely stunning (and perhaps has an overall stronger cumulative effect), with stories like "The Incident at Owl's Head" (good God!), "Twilight of the Bat", "New Year's Eve: a True Story" being particularly powerful. This book also includes collaborations with other artists, giving the volume a wide variety of styles, tones, and imagery. Simmons’ stories leave the taste of nightmare on your tongue—I read this book on a vacation, and my memory of that trip is inextricably linked with the unease the stories evoked. There’s no bones about it: alongside contemporaries Julia Gfrörer and Emily Carroll, Simmons is one of the undisputable masters of horror comics.
Profile Image for Shazia.
269 reviews14 followers
November 16, 2018
Flayed Corpse and Other Stories is a collection of Josh Simmons’ comics, and includes a few of his comics that features other artists’ work. Even though I’ve only read one other book by Simmons, I feel like I’m already very familiar with his work. Black River was disturbing enough to leave an impression on me and I suspected Flayed Corpse would probably be equally disturbing and graphic. Also if you take a look at the back of the book you can see it’s rated “Hard R Ultra-Depressoid,” which is an interesting way to describe his work.

Perhaps because I was expecting the worst from these comics I wasn’t surprised by anything I saw within these pages, from the gory bloody face slashing to a monster consistently shitting over a town (???). A few of the comics in this collection were a bit creepy but there wasn’t anything in this anthology that made my skin crawl. Sure some of the comics are uncomfortable to look at but I guess compared to Black River it wasn’t that bad.
75 reviews
August 5, 2019
I chuckled all the way down into a pit of despair while reading this. What a striking balance between sharp wit, jarringly depressing scenes, and striking art.
Profile Image for Maggie Siebert.
Author 3 books284 followers
September 13, 2023
traded books with josh and he sent me a copy of this. i've read quite a few horror comics anthologies and i would recommend this one with no caveats. such a wide range of modes on display here story-wise, and the collaborative spirit of this particular project made for a ton of visual variety too. highlights for me were "late for the show," "the incident at owl's head," "the great shitter," "gwyn" and the stellar "twilight of the bat." that last one in particular really did it for me, and has me clamoring to find a copy of 'dream of the bat' for myself.
Profile Image for Josephus FromPlacitas.
227 reviews35 followers
September 21, 2018
A solidly drawn but uninterestingly conceived set of short stories, most of them flat and directionless. I'd seen some of these stories in mini-comics format before, like The Incident At Owl's Head, which is the strongest of a weak bunch, along with Twilight of the Bat and Don't Look Up. But even Incident struggles to find any sort of arc or change for the character to go through, and other stories Seaside Home are lovingly, beautifully rendered disaster sequences with no conceptual reason for pulling in a reader's interest.

It's a little shocking to find out that the author is middle aged, rather than a 20-something Northwestern kid. It's perhaps a little ageist to think it, but I would have expected a little more interest in observed human nature from an older individual than was on display. These stories felt like a Mike Diana gore game with slightly better dialogue or characterization, but ultimately only there for the scene where a face gets cut off. There might be a Kafka-style exploration of failure, fate, doom, a character's desire for self-destruction or draw toward nihilism, but only a couple stories even manage to flirt with that possibility. The title story has no discernible point at all, others have a little development. Lots of the last frames conclude with lines like "Nothing could have been done," or "It's not your baby anyway" in a dream sequence where a dream Gwyneth Paltrow can't break through a wall to save a crying baby -- there's nothing that ultimately matters or justifies why the story that preceded each gory ending needed your attention.

A story like "Late for the Show" at least had a little bit of a joke to it, about a self-involved punk hipster ignoring local carnage for an exclusive chance to see an obscure band and ultimately being disappointed with the show. But there wasn't a self-critical humor or broader believable comment on being alive to most of the material.
Profile Image for Bill Hsu.
991 reviews221 followers
August 4, 2021
Reread. And a frustrating experience similar to other work by Simmons. There are lovely panel sequences, and the quieter moments can be poignant and effective. For example, the first half of "The Cave", with the narrator walking with his senile mother to visit the titular cave from his youth, is delicate and quite touching. Then it erupts in a pitch black bloodbath that just seems adolescent and unnecessary. I also loved the uncertainty and narrative tension in "The Incident at Owl's Head", a somewhat Aickman-esque weird tale that's been completely updated to a contemporary context. But the ending ruined the story for me in just two panels of ham handed clarification.

Most of the other stories fall into the over-the-top absurd violence category that I have no patience for these days. Sigh.
Profile Image for Guillermo Galvan.
Author 4 books104 followers
February 17, 2021
I miss getting together with friends who can properly watch a horror movie. Spike goes in the eyeball and everyone cheers. Josh Simmons invited a diverse group of artists and captured that energy in a book.

Flayed departs from Simmons’ classic hardcore dark horror. This time it’s about the humor in the horror. Sometimes it’s subtle like his Batman inspired, Twilight of the Bat, in which a crime-fighter and his clown nemesis are the sole survivors at the end of the world. Other times the laughs are blasting out of rectums as in his illustration, Excitement.

Simmons could be accused of having a juvenile sense of humor. Well, guilty as charged. However, he has already proved himself as a serious artist in his previous works. Simmons is an artist who functions in extremes, and that also applies to his comedy.

Simmons on horror-comedy:

“Two sides of the same coin! Both elicit a response in your body, they are generally the least intellectual genres (although of course there can be very smart horror and comedy stories). Visceral is the word. I'd put porn in the same realm.”

His ridiculous stories hold together with Kafka glue. In the Great Shitter, a story about a village that exists under a gigantic monster who devours the countryside and continuously defecates on the village sounds like something a middle-school punk invented. But at the end, a glimmer of real suffering cuts through the silliness.

A few horror stories are dangerous. The Incident at Owl’s Head is realistic story with a touch of magical realism that deals with abduction. In A Day at the Beach a female professor with her daughter meets her former student who is drunk. It’s an ordinary situation that inspires more fright than it should.

Flayed Corpse is a mix of illustrations, comics, and friends with a warped sense of humor. In closing I’m reminded by a quote by Albert Camus:

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

If that resonates with you, go read Flayed Corpse and the rest of Simmons’ books.
Profile Image for Brian Dickerson.
229 reviews2 followers
June 17, 2018
A disturbing and crude set of short stories... But... Likeable? Yes. "The Incident at Owl's Head" and "Twilight of the Bat" were my favorites.
Profile Image for Bob Comparda.
296 reviews13 followers
June 16, 2023
Gory, bloody, demented, dark, twisted, evil, fun
Profile Image for 🐴 🍖.
490 reviews39 followers
Read
February 16, 2025
the one that's batman and joker in a post apocalyptic landscape is actually p emotionally affecting??
Profile Image for Sem.
597 reviews30 followers
October 29, 2018
If Josh Simmons wasn't so afraid of accidentally giving a fuck and trying to do some decent plot or at least just trying to make it one collection without doing some grotesque idiotic story about feces, he might have just been a must-read author for me. But, alas, some of this feels like Prison Pit but without any of the demented originality and way too tryhard. There are some nice designs and a few of the stories (mainly ones that aren't written by him) end up pretty alright. But it's like bobbing for apples in a barrel of poisoned water.
Profile Image for Chelsea.
67 reviews12 followers
April 26, 2018
So very very very dark, comical, tragic, twisted, odd, gross, disturbing, and WONDERFUL! I don't know what else I can say about these fantastic tales that I didn't just read in this excellent review:
http://www.tcj.com/reviews/flayed-cor...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What I can say that this a Josh Simmons that I will actual feel happy to reread sometime soon (as opposed to needing to be in strange or dark mood)!
Profile Image for Dakota Morgan.
3,390 reviews53 followers
February 27, 2019
Some, uh, excellent shock comics in here if that's the kind of thing you're into. Basically 100% fever dreams, most featuring gross-out sex acts, shitting, or mutilation. I guess if the title didn't give it away, this is a fucked up collection of comics. Nothing stood out to me as especially good, but some were oddly memorable. Probably that shock value.
Profile Image for Nick Kozel.
55 reviews1 follower
Read
December 2, 2024
After reading this again I’m willing to admit Simmon’s appeal. Josh Simmons quells up feelings of fear, disgust and hatred like no other comic writer can. There’s an inkling of comedy, but its comedy only makes the acts being committed more disturbing as it adds brevity where there shouldn’t be. It’s the disturbing thoughts a child has at their most malicious.
Profile Image for Matt Graupman.
1,053 reviews20 followers
January 5, 2019
It can be fairly easy to kind of dismiss comics. What I mean is that, despite being a very (!) labor-intensive art form, they tend to be easily digestible. It often takes a creator years to complete a book that can be read in an afternoon; then, it’s on to the next one. Josh Simmons’ comics are not like that. Gritty, visceral, and in-your-face, his work uses violence and grotesque imagery in ways that are unforgettable and unsettlingly lovely. The short stories collected in “Flayed Corpse And Other Stories” are the product of an extremely talented, versatile hand and a seriously twisted mind. I imagine this book will be introduced as Exhibit A in Simmons’ inevitable criminal trial.

FAVORITES:
“The Incident At Owl’s Head” - A drifter accepts the generosity of wealthy man whose true intentions are anything but friendly.
“Country Road” - An accident on a dark backwoods lane leads a man to contemplate his options.
“Don’t Look Up” - A dreamy piece about a reclusive woman who shares her dream home with an infestation of evil spirits.
Profile Image for Siegfried.
59 reviews
August 13, 2025
I wanted to read a graphic novel because they’ve always been nostalgic for me and a very important part of my adolescence. This time, I was looking for something grotesque and dark. Flayed Corpse and Other Stories certainly delivered.

The stories here are humorously grotesque and wildly exaggerated, yet within all the absurdity, there are moments of surprising truth. These tales explore the twisted nature of sexual desire, the dull ennui of life when nothing changes, the viciousness of our own thoughts, the loneliness that follows when we finally get the solitude we wished for, and the heavy question of whether we can live with our own actions—among other uncomfortable truths of modern life.

The vibe I get from this book, I would call it “absurd horror,” though I’m not sure that’s an official genre. Either way, it fits. I enjoyed it, and some of the illustrations were downright gnarly.
Profile Image for Ryan.
1,279 reviews12 followers
August 12, 2020
Really a mixed bag of stories. They are done in so many different styles and many are written with a wildly different tone that it's hard for me to shift tonal gears in my head when I move from one to the next. If I could complain about any, I would say that a few of them are done with tiny panels where the action is really hard to distinguish. When I can't tell what is being portrayed, I don't see much reason to read the story. And this is not because I'm old and blind, but because the original formats must have been much bigger, but are squeezed into a page size that is not quite right. Also really love some of his single panel pieces and the cover design leaves me transfixed. Would love to see Simmons do some longer works done in color some time, these short works would pale in comparison.
Profile Image for Rick Ray.
3,545 reviews36 followers
November 29, 2022
A mix of fun and forgettable stories in this collection. I liked the variety of stuff in here, particularly in the various formalisms that Simmons dabbles in. Some of his writing has sharp wit to it, but other times I definitely feel like the ideas were only half baked. The longest story in here, "The Incident at Owl's Head", is the strongest and demonstrates Simmons at his best. It's eerie, immersive and surreal, and made the entire book worthwhile for me. Overall, this is a good way to sample a lot of Simmons' work and understand whether or not he appeals to you as a cartoonist.
Profile Image for Chelsea Martinez.
633 reviews4 followers
March 27, 2019
These are horror comics and just not really my thing. That being said, I liked these collaborations between Josh Simmons and others best:
The Great Shitter
A Day at the Beach - the nightmare is that a drunk bro who was one of your students finds you on the beach with your child while you are on vacation and harrasses the two of you
Country Road - manslaughter
Don't Look Up - I didn't know what Djinn were
Profile Image for Przemysław Skoczyński.
1,412 reviews48 followers
March 6, 2022
Nie wiem dlaczego to lubię, ale lubię. Simmons przy wsparciu kilku innych autorów bawi się konwencją horroru czasem przekraczając granicę, która dla wielu jest nieprzekraczalna. Kilka historii urwało się jakby za wcześnie, w innych brakowało wyraźnej pointy, ale generalnie - co już nie pierwszy raz mnie dziwi - czytało się świetnie. Zdecydowanie najciekawsze były dłuższe historie, szczególnie postapo z Batmanem i Jockerem. Dla koneserów
Profile Image for Snusmumriken.
25 reviews
August 7, 2025
Simmons is weird to me, i didnt really like black river and i gave up on The furry trap since i thought it was too meanspirited and edgy for the sake of edgy (shock value can only take you so far, yknow?) but flayed corpse was mors surreal and bizaree instead of grotesque so i did enjoy it alot. The art is nice and some of the writing did actually move me, ill have to check out more of Simmons work cause if his other books are as good as this im very curious!
Profile Image for Ruz El.
864 reviews20 followers
July 20, 2020
A collection of Simmons shorts from numerous sources. Subject and tone wise they are all over the place, with the horror ones playing the best for me. That said, while none where what I would call bad, none of them stood out either.
Profile Image for Bob Green.
326 reviews2 followers
February 2, 2021
Arresting, hyper-violent artwork for a selection of stories that don’t seem to have any point (or did I miss the point?), though the two longest stories about owl’s nest and Batman made it all worthwhile.
Profile Image for Natalia.
130 reviews
Read
January 31, 2024
Absurd, weird, terrifying, sometimes gross/violent stories that were nonetheless entertaining. Good layouts, good artwork, good collaborations. Still, these stories are not going to be entertaining to just anyone. You probably have to be a horror fan to appreciate them.
Profile Image for chrstphre campbell.
277 reviews
September 8, 2025
Very Dark ( ? )

Is this what real life is like ( ? )
I often think I’m living in some kind of bubble, where I’m shielded from real life, & I’m only exposed to it in comix !
Is that how reality works ( ? ) !
Displaying 1 - 30 of 55 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.