Book Review: Human Tenderloin by Craig Wallwork

I think I'm going to experiment with adding my book reviews to this space for the one person who comes here.

                                             

Craig Wallwork’s Human Tenderloin is a collection of 16 short stories.

The opening track is ‘Bird Girl,’ a bit of a body horror/grotesquerie playing over the background of an apocalypse. Bird Girl’s outer world is grim and dark but its inner life contains warm, bright notes of hope. Like a lot of Human Tenderloin, it’s ultimately a story of Love - in this case, parental Love.

I really appreciated that facet of these stories.

Love - Capital L Love.

There are plenty of horrors out there, and none I’ve read have trod so steadily the narrow path of real, loving notes that don’t stray into greeting card sentimentality.

***Editorial sidebar: Too much of my reading (and viewing) in the last year has featured remorseless horrors that sell humanity short in exchange for brutal & shocking violence or rely on a cheap supposition to prop up shoddy approximations of better stories.***

The second entry in Human Tenderloin is ‘Dollhouse’ - a creepy little cursed object story, pressed into its musty surroundings like a footprint in a swamp. The dread slowly pools like water leeching up through the earth. Odds are, you’ll see the end coming - as you will with other stories here - but it doesn’t lessen the effect.

Similarly, the title track, ‘Human Tenderloin’ has a hazily visible climax that doesn’t tarnish the tale in the least, as it relies on its own bizarre circumstances and almost slapstick level humor to carry it through a tale largely about sourcing long pork for butchering and eating among a close-knit group of ghoulish gourmands.

My favorite entry in Human Tenderloin is ‘Paradise Won.’ ‘Paradise Won’ is an almost funny meditation on love and loss, repentance and forgiveness from the perspective of a widower renting a cabin from the devil. I won’t say more than that because, even though ‘Paradise Won’ does nothing to hide its cards, it manages to be surprising and moving nonetheless.

There are some truly bizarre mindbender horrors in here as well. Most notably: ‘The Hole’ ‘Time’s Flies’ ‘Murder Song’ and ‘They Were Born Without Faces’

‘Nothing Short of Dying’ is brutal, bizarre, downright gross, perhaps - and yet, it is a love story. And that is what elevates this and so many other stories in Human Tenderloin beyond being beautifully written oddities.

If there’s a low note here, it’s the hidden track, ‘The Ballad of Windsong House’ - a longer tale than the rest whose introduction is a bit laborious but serves its own payoff well. It has the feel of a bloated short story or perhaps a truncated novella. In the end, ‘Windsong’ circles back around to the connective tissue that holds the entire collection together, Love. Capital L Love.

I’ve been truly disenchanted by a lot of my reading of late, feeling that storytelling had become a contest of grim ideas and horrible suffering visited upon rooms stuffed with poor approximations of humanity. Human Tenderloin is populated by people that feel real, often sympathetic - at the very least understandable - even in the most horrific and strange of circumstances.

My only complaint about human Tenderloin is also one of its greatest strengths. The language is consistently beautiful and inventive. It always feels fresh and lush and filled with the Love that suffuses the entire collection. For me, it felt at times just the thinnest layer too thick, which is really hardly any complaint at all.

TLDR: Horror built on a solid foundation of Love, weirdness, and prose sharp enough to carve a steak from your leg. The collection I’ve read that shares the most DNA with Human Tenderloin is Joe Hill’s Full throttle - one of my all-time favorite collections.