Soze Says

It would be a hell of a thing to live in Bryan Smith's literary world. In most of his novels the women are, without exception, smoking hot or used to be smoking hot. They're also almost all sexually carnivorous and capable of murder at the drop of a hat. Men are hunky Adonis types, power-hungry crackpots, or backwoods hillbillys. All three types are instantly smitten with any of the sexually carnivorous, smoking hot women they come across. Then, the women of Bryan Smith's world usually make them pay for said interest in any number of deviant or deplorable ways...

Go Kill Crazy! is no exception to any of the above Smith-sonian rules. It's just less horror than his usual fare and more of a ... I was going to say "exploitation novel" there, but what type of exploitation I can't decide, since everybody gets exploited in equal measure in this one. Sure, women are kidnapped, raped and brutalised. But they also perpetrate the same crimes against men, only with murder as the additional ace-up-their-sleeves. Ethnic origin doesn't matter to Smith; everybody is as good a target for a bullet as anyone else. Likewise sexual preference is irrelevant insofar as hetero, homo, or in between, every character in his world is just as likely to kill or be killed.

So Go Kill Crazy! is not really exploitative. What it is, is a great deal of mindlessly violent entertainment. Three super-hot women go on a cross country rampage purely because they're angry at how the men in their past have treated them. Along the way, one woman's ex-boyfriend becomes embroiled in the affairs of a modern day Jim Jones-esque cult, and is soon hoping his ex and her friends can help him out of the hole he finds himself in. Cue bullets, mayhem, sex, torture and murder aplenty.

I really enjoy the way Smith writes. He paints a picture with an economy of words that is enviable. His dialogue generally has the pace and feel of a real conversation. But - and this is a sizable but - Go Kill Crazy! became repetitive for me by the 70% mark. Initially two of the girls' backstories were just too similar. Once I had that worked out, the plot seemed to meander through its middle parts with a few too many scenes outlining how horrible and nasty the women could be. The climax, given all that had come before it, was also a little underwhelming.

Still, this one is a mostly-fun, ridiculously over-the-top action romp that contains enough nudity, gore and blood-spatter to satisfy all but the most potentially deranged of readers.

3 Bullets Tearing Through Skulls for Go Kill Crazy!.

The preceding honest review is based on a free ebook made available by Samhain Publishing via Netgalley.