Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Horror should never be trapped inside a package that has on its paper surface the words polite nor pleasant, if that is the book you are looking for within the genre designed to make us feel the damnation of our existence then we perhaps should be exercising caution on just how such writing can be gleaned as influential and considered a worthy inclusion into the realm of nightmares and existential dread.
It takes a writer of incredible worth and fearlessness to approach his readers and the public at large with a tale that is stops short of being splatterpunk and all its associated tropes but which is willing to shake hands with it, sit in its company and use the finest examples of gore and shock to deliver a tale which is delightfully revolting and which grants the reader the heart of distress in a silver platter.
One of the finest of modern-day horror, Bootle legend D E McCluskey, returns with a tale absolutely dripping in the well of human distress, shock, and observational bloodletting in the fantastically unholy Unborn.
D E McCluskey’s prowess as a writer willing to take those brave enough to see beyond the thin gauze of what might be considered respectable horror, the almost effortless pastoral weight of the English countryside drenched in the horrific and the personal, is one of great presentation; and in Unborn that sense of mirroring modern society with a narrative that is a physical demonstration of a burning fire soon devastating the reader’s mind is once again perfectly imagined and delivered with no remorse.
To be immersed in the psychological breakdown of a woman living at the edge, a woman who typifies modern excess and its rules and own sense of betrayal when things get out of hand is to be admired, the sense of grief underlining the tale is overwhelming, the fear at every stage of the complex downfall of Susan Seagrave’s life as her own personal nightmare, in life, and in the darkness, resonates with acute ferocity; and with disturbing imaginative brilliance.
It is in the violence of the piece, the destructive intrusion of the unholy, that brings the story together, and in his instinctive insightful way DE McCluskey proves himself to be considered a master of the genre.
Unborn is exactly what is needed at this moment, a tale that hits home and frames the unquestionable deceit that is forever conceived in the fight between good and that which is evil. Nothing short of incredible.
Ian D. Hall