Review of The Girl with the Barbed Wire Hair by Carlton Mellick III

Some CM3 books are not really bizarro. 

This falls into that category. There is the usual horror, gore, sex and supernatural stuff, but none of it is particularly avant-guarde punk. The barbed wire hair visuals are slightly bizarro, but not really.

Aside from faltering when it comes to conjuring a creepy atmosphere, this is more of a love story featuring awkward teens. The second part of the book adds a layer of psychological torture and a disturbing undertones of control and enabling. The latter third of the book was much better than the lead up.

I must also complain about the covers of his recent novellas. Not only are they misleading, they are not varied enough. I guess the author/ publisher is going for a consistent aesthetic, but it does not do the books justice. CM3 has an incredibly unpredictable body of work. The covers should reveal an element of horror, comedy, and zany bizarro environment.

This was one of his blandest, least humorous, and tamest stories. The characters have flaws and arcs, but the book relied heavily on Japanese tropes, paying homage to The Ring and its clones. I dislike books about high school bullying. It’s just been done so many times. It’s a cheap way to try to force your reader to feel sympathy for your characters. Setting the book in Japan did not do anything to enhance the atmosphere. He would have been better served taking his time and adding more description. The book is lean and hastily written, but still fluffy, like a young adult novel, overly focused on internal monologues.

As one of the least interesting of his books I would call it skippable. It is not a good introduction to his style. Neither is it tightly written. He normally avoids fluff words, or edits them out, as he should. I typically rate him much higher than Stephen King, but this was about on King’s level of schlock. It is meant to be a quick, easy read. Dumbed-down horror that is not even scary. Nothing in media has actually scared me for the past fifteen years but this was definitely unhorrific. Ghost girls creeping around are now cliched. If it were made into a film, the ghost girl would walk down a staircase on all fours making cracking sounds with her back.

But with all this said. It can still be read with passive enjoyment in my opinion. For diehard fans of the author, it adds another subgenre to his repertoire. I hope he writes another, more compelling ghost story, especially given his claims in the intro, where he relates his real-life encounters with ghosts. Even the bad books of CM3 are better than the generic, watered-down, interchangeable, blatantly woke, bestselling crud you find on the bookstore shelves.