Book Review: Clay McLeod Chapman serves unique courses in Acquired Taste
- Jonathan
- 55 minutes ago
- 3 min read
This review contains minor spoilers
Last September, we were treated to a unique blend of flavors with the release of Acquired Taste, Clay McLeod Chapman’s macabre collection of short stories. This month, we’re being given a second helping of this collection with an official paperback release nine months after its original publication.
The collection consists of almost a decade’s worth of 25 short stories that, as Clay pointed out in our recent interview with him, largely features flavor and appetite. The Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker award-nominated author uses everything from baby carrots to self-mutilating Boy Scouts to weave gnarly tales within the dark shadows of addiction, politics and peculiar appetites.
Indeed, the stories in Acquired Taste are a buffet of unnerving variety. Politics are a recurring aspect in many of them, exploring monument-obsessed vigilantes and rallygoers worshipping idols with posterboards. Some stories even tie together with the unsubtle far-right “Fax News” channel (humor is clearly well-mixed into the horror).
Psychological terror is prevalent, though not to the extent of Bodies of Work, Clay's most recent publication. The stories are loaded with grotesque imagery, which come alive through the descriptions of male-produced black breast milk, bodily-invasive hermit crabs and toad stools sprouting from throats. The dedication to detail extends to even the most mundane items, such as a sleazy hotel room with “solar flares of urine stains radiating out beneath the bedsheets.”
One story that stood out was “Knockoffs,” about a father who buys his screen-addicted daughter a Tubby Wubby; a stuffed animal that looks like “a sock monkey mated with a lamprey.” Before long, more of these furry things start appearing (I couldn’t help but think of the Tribbles from Star Trek) and they turn into both a sensation and epidemic. Despite an absurd—but fun—premise, “Knockoffs” has a few things to say about YouTube content culture and screen addiction, particularly in kids. At one point the creatures literally eat books.
But my favorite story was “Psychic Santa,” which was about a long-time department store Santa Claus with the ability to see the ghosts of children. He regularly takes their final wishes and requests in the same way children line up to sit on his lap and tell him what they want for Christmas. At his former job he was a school bus driver, and after some hangover-induced judgment crashed it into a truck. He woke from a resulting coma with the ability. For the most part the story lacks the gruesome descriptions that define most of the collection, but it is nonetheless compelling, and I sincerely hope Clay considers expanding it into a novel. One of the ghosts happens to be a character mentioned in another story.
The collection is not without its flaws, however, with the most prominent one being a sometimes-unclear sense of direction. It is a horror collection after all, so Clay has no requirement to be totally transparent in every story, but there were moments where I was wondering exactly what he was trying to say, if anything.
One such story was “Our Summer in the pit,” a 1980s-set nostalgic tale about some local kids hanging out in a crater-like depression in their neighborhood, finding animal skeletons at the bottom. While I won’t give anything else away, this rather interesting plot never really blossoms into its full potential, even considering its short 14-page life.
But through that story and every other story in the collection, Clay McLeod Chapman takes our hand through a guided tour of his delightfully twisted imagination. An imagination that cooks up recipes from politics, addiction, paranoia, and youth to satisfy the unique palates of horror readers. With the recipes he’s served here, virtually every palate is satisfied through 282 pages of entertainingly bizarre readings that are, true to his word, an acquired taste.