image003.jpgSatan's 3-Ring Circus of Hell

Robert Steven Rhine

Asylum Press

Web: http://www.asylumpress.com

Also see:

Girls and Corpses

Web: http://www.girlsandcorpses.com/

 

Satan's 3-Ring Circus of Hell is a powerful horror anthology exploring all manner of horror and transgressive subject matter. Writer Robert Steven Rhine has filled this visually stunning volume with some forty or so short stories featuring gore, sex, violence, zombies, sex, horror and ever other possible dark genre. The stories are all created in different styles and hence you get a diverse range of artistic expression from full colour gore to black and white comics, fake adverts to full page cartoons. Rhine has brought together a literal cornucopia of artists such as William Stout, Tim Vigil, John Cassaday, Jim Smith and Steve Bissette, indeed there is art from over forty artists in this one volume so really is a intense journey into wild territory. 

 

Intense is in many ways a good word, Rhine has a very wild and sick imagination as well as a dark and perverse approach to horror, at the same time this is matched with a great sense of humour, so even in the darkest tales there is usually a dose of wit and some tongue in cheek humour.

 

Satan's 3-Ring Circus of Hell is a truly strange volume, some of the art is incredibly beautiful such as The Great Cthulhu while other stories are just so grotesque you want to look away but can’t. There are all sorts of unusual stories here from an army private who is the guinea pig for a top secret drug which prolongs emotions and feelings to a Hollywood graveyard bus tour which literally digs up the dirt on deceased stars. There is a zombie eating competition, Separation Anxiety invites into the world of freak love and desires gone very much awry, there are tales of plastic surgery, even a story (Gas Pains) about a woman who gives birth to snakes, there some rather perverse full page adverts, the Symposium about a vampire convention and lots and lots more.

 

Satan's 3-Ring Circus of Hell is 256 pages in length with 120 pages in color and 136 pages in black and white half toned and hence packed with intense ground breaking content.

 

As with other products by Rhine the production values are the very best. The colour quality is superb and the detail in the black and white comics is quite astounding.   This is a product of the highest quality, extreme, outrageous and transgressive, just like I like ‘em !

 

There is something to shock, offend, stimulate and horrify everyone here. In other words, it is a great buy !