You asked for it, Georges Dandin…
You’d think you know what to expect from extreme horror. You’d think you’ve already read enough Ed Lee to be at least somewhat inoculated. But in truth, nothing can prepare you for the sheer level of repulsiveness that assaults the reader in "The Pig". Jesus... While reading this ghastly thing, I was genuinely haunted by the vision of one of my perfectly normal, non-horror friends someday stumbling upon a copy of "Three Little Pigs", opening it at random—and calling a doctor.
Because Ed doesn’t take prisoners here. Really. I’ve read my share. I remember the birth of splatterpunk, various Grand Guignol-style grotesqueries, early Clive Barker, Everson, Ketchum. I’ve been through Ed Lee well enough—and I don’t mean just his more “restrained” and “balanced” works like "Creakers" or " City Infernal", but even brutally extreme "Bighead"!
The opening novel, "The Pig", sets entirely new standards of extremity. Brrrr. For most of the story I was honestly reading with my eyes half-closed, pushing on only out of sheer readerly stubbornness, thoroughly disgusted and nauseated by the horrors being described. This time, I thought, Ed had gone too far. Where was the effective plot—even amid all the gore? Where was the literary idea? Where was the black humor that saved "Bighead" in its most extreme moments? And I put “plot” in quotation marks deliberately, because "The Pig" barely has one at all.
The 1970s. A lonely, remote farm where an amateur filmmaker, terrorized by the mafia, shoots a steady stream of 8mm pornos together with two heavily drugged-out junkies. But not just any pornos—only the fattest, nastiest perversions and deviations. The main course is sex with animals (yikes!): dogs, donkeys, the titular pig—you name it. Add to that extra “meat,” meaning, as Lee himself puts it, “wetties, snuffies, necra,” and so on. The graphic descriptions of torture, murder, bestiality, and the humiliation and degradation inflicted on both women and on the filmmaker himself (a deeply unfortunate victim of bad life choices) are enough to pulverize even the toughest reader.
And yet—eventually—Lee lights the narrative fireworks, and suddenly it becomes proper genre stuff: grotesque, macabre, and despite all the continuing atrocities, irresistibly funny. The thugs stop delivering food to the farm. To hell with the junkies—they only care about drugs anyway—but Leonard (the filmmaker) is perpetually, furiously hungry. He survives by stealing dog food (yikes…), but that only goes so far. When the girls, in a fit of drug-fueled rage, kill the pig, the director gets a rather obvious idea—and soon he’s happily stuffing himself with roasted ham and bacon… except this pig wasn’t an ordinary pig. It had been stolen from a nearby religious cult, where it was being raised for participation in a special ritual. You can’t just eat its meat. I mean—you can, but there will be consequences…
The brutal, predatory, quintessentially Ed Lee–style finale more than compensates for the nausea induced by the earlier excesses.
After this utterly over-the-top first part, the story calms down a little. Well—no, not in the sense that anything suddenly becomes gentle. It still overflows with vulgar, spectacularly disgusting sexual descriptions, but narratively the second novel is somewhat “lighter.”
Early 21st century. Various disturbing rumors circulate about “snuff house,” supposedly haunted by the ghosts of murdered victims. Melvin, a young journalist, arrives with plans to write a compelling article. At his father’s request, Melvin’s hypersexual young stepmother joins him—the old man doesn’t want her bored and alone at home.
Gwyneth isn’t just sexy; she’s also a practicing naturist, which means she spends most of her time walking around the house naked. But Melvin is deeply withdrawn, awkward in human interactions, so he makes no attempt to seduce his father’s wife, contenting himself instead with erotic fantasies, manual relief, and occasional encounters with a girl loosely connected to a nearby motorcycle gang.
As time passes, strange things begin happening on the farm, and the residents’ personalities start to change. The stepmother, in a sense unconsciously, gives herself over to acts of the most depraved debauchery with the bikers, while Melvin begins to feel new desires and new aspects of his personality awakening. He becomes more assertive, more angry, more willing to stand his ground.
Years later, Lee added a third installment. "The Ouija Pig" follows a group of YouTubers shooting urbex-style content in haunted locations (think "The Blair Witch Project" and its many clones). The cameraman, Theo—a withdrawn, overweight man—finds old snuff films once shot by Leonard for the mafia in a shed, and begins watching them with growing fascination—and growing changes to his personality.
The effects are swift. Sarah, his sexy friend who has always treated him as a purely asexual, cuddly buddy, suddenly burns with desire at the sight of him and gives herself to him in a series of passionate encounters. Their affair frustrates another man, Jake, whose misfortune is having a fiancée, Chloe, who shows absolutely no interest in sex.
Once again, the ghosts of the past influence the newcomers to the house, leading to final reckonings and a cynical finale that fuses macabre excess with black humor.
A word about the craft. Lee isn’t a particularly good writer. He’s no master stylist, no Stephen King, but he does have a compact, readable style that somehow allows you to survive even the most revolting passages. Special praise is due for occasional stylistic flourishes, such as the "House of Cards"-style fourth-wall breaking in "Ouija Pig", where Ed addresses the reader directly (it’s hard not to laugh at lines like: “After so many years of describing every conceivable sexual act, I’m honestly sick of it—just imagine for yourselves what happened next”).
The unifying element of the entire cycle, binding it into a coherent whole, is the figure of the main protagonist: a bullied, spineless incel who falls victim to demonic possession, transforming him into a murderous, debauched monster. The other characters serve purely functional roles and never really command the author’s attention.
Parts two and three are no longer as nauseating as the original "The Pig"—but that first book is strictly for THE BRAVEST. Everyone else should consider themselves warned: this is the highest concentration of vitriol found in nature, burning holes in metal like Xenomorph blood.