Stuck on You and Other Prime Cuts by Jasper Bark
Crystal Lake Publishing (September 2014)
274 pages; $12.99 paperback; $3.99 e-book
Reviewed by Brian Moser
Stuck On You and Other Prime Cuts is a series of short stories which range from the gut-wrenchingly grotesque to the more unsettling horror that keeps the reader guessing the whole way through. Stuck On You is a particularly unnerving story where a man wakes up to find himself balls deep in the corpse of his newest affair, a corpse which is more than a little unwilling to let him pull out. How the Dark Bleeds recounts the tale of a seemingly unstable woman, sitting in the subbasement of a hospital, watching the past few months of her life through a puddle of her own blood, whilst fearing something in the dark around her.
All and all, Stuck On You and Other Prime Cuts has its ups and downs. Some stories truly draw you in with their ominous and subtle nature, while others seem to lack any real depth and only serve the purpose of triggering the reader’s gag reflex. However, that seems to be exactly what Bark was going for, and he did it very well.
