After a mysterious and unexplained ‘explosion’, people all over an anonymous city are infected with a gruesome disease that makes them carnivorous, gooey and inflames their abdomens to a grisly, translucent sack of oozing organs. Juggling so many plotlines and characters in such a short novella is tricky, so it is forgivable that Rice drops a few during this fast-paced gore-fest. Unfortunately, Rice hampers his own best work by making this story so short, and whilst his ideas and characters are fresh and interesting, he lets himself down with just as many mistakes as triumphs. It takes an innovative approach to the idea of what a zombie can be, and fills its sixty-four pages with a plethora of characters that for the most part avoid the survival-horror clichés. Gerald Dean Rice’s Fleshbags is a short, if somewhat clumsy, shiv to the ribs that packs in more guts and quivering organs than most zombie movies. The world of horror fiction has been heavily saturated with tame, teen-vampire mush over the past few years, so it is quite pleasing to come across something that pulls no punches in the gore department. Chris Hall reviews Gerald Dean Rice’s novella, Fleshbags
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