Maggots Screaming by Max Booth III
Ghoulish Books (April 2022)
342 pages; $17.67 Paperback; $5.99 ebook
Reviewed by Anton Cancre
Max Booth III has set himself up as the king of turning the worst ideas on the planet into absolute gold. Two old friends arguing in a basement because one thinks he is a werewolf? Killer. A family stuck in their bathroom? Heartbreaking. A father and a son dig up their own corpses from the back garden…
Yup, that is the elevator pitch here. At best, a minute-long gag filling space in a cheap anthology film. WEIRD! CREEPY! DONE! And we move on with our lives.
But not Max. Nope. He manages to turn it into a stupidly engaging book.
I think it has to do with the combination of his off-kilter sense of humor, honest sense of warts-and-all humanity, and ability to always find somewhere weirder to go with the story. That right there is a winning combo. Sure, every creative writing teacher in the world would be apoplectic at the lack of the standard plot arc and character growth, but he somehow makes it work.
So, yeah. Get Maggots Screaming. Have a good time with it.
