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As a lover of weird fiction and classic detective fiction, this was the book I never knew I was looking for. For many, some of the imagery will be too much, but I grew up when rotten.com was a thing, so I’m pretty desensitized to the gross-out business.

Thing is, here the gross-outs serve a purpose. The further our heroes travel into the American rabbit hole, the more ridiculously horrifying it becomes. Gross-out satire? Have you been reading my diary?

I was going to give this book a passable three stars. It’s decent, but predictable. It’s silly and maddeningly trite at times. It’s often a bit heavy-handed.

But the more I thought about what I wanted to say here, the more I realized how damned entertaining it was to read. I added a star to a three-star review because this book is just a lot of fun. It reminded me of the best in 80s horror films, and was not at all what I expected it to be when I picked it up.

…but a lot of crazy fun. I’m a sucker for oral histories, and this one was never dull. Just suspend all disbelief going in and read it as a satire rather than horror.