8/14/26
Off to a wedding later today, so I suspect there will be no activity here this weekend. Not sure there will be a newsletter on Sunday, either.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 103
Ritualistic Human Sacrifice by C.V. Hunt
Nick Graves is a miserable man. Every day he comes home from his dream job to a stale marriage. On the day he finally summons the courage to tell his wife, Eve, he wants a divorce she has exciting news for him – she’s pregnant. Nick is a spiteful man. He purchases his dream home in an ideal location far away from family, friends, and coworkers. It’s a life changing decision he’s chosen to make without Eve’s consultation. Nick is a terrified man. He quickly realizes the residents of his new hometown are a bit eccentric. After a trip to the local doctor’s office Eve begins to behave strangely. And once Nick finds out what’s really going on he’ll never be able to look at Eve the same way.
Given the popularity of writers such as CJ Leede and RJ Joseph, one might think that Extreme Horror has always had a feminist component to it. But if we look at the early days of the subgenre, I’m hard-pressed to find any clear examples. Perhaps an argument could be made for the works of Clive Barker or Charlee Jacob, or some of Gerard Houarner’s stories, but I’m not sure actual feminist themes are shining through loud and clear in any of them. Edward Lee, who has been a tireless champion of uplifting women on the business side of things, certainly wasn’t imbuing his early works with a feminist point of view.
I’ll argue that we don’t really see that come into regular play in Extreme Horror until the arrival of Christine Morgan and C.V. Hunt. And Ritualistic Human Sacrifice, first published in 2015, is — in many ways — the book that ushered this new era in. If 2015 was the start of the new Golden Age of Horror (an argument that Christopher Golden and I make in a forthcoming new book codenamed Operation Little Golden Book but you’ll find out its real name soon enough), then this novel is as important to indie-horror as Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts (also published that year) was to mainstream horror. And indeed, much like Tremblay’s novel, it’s divisive among readers and critics, whom for the most part seem to either love it or hate it. That reaction is always going to be preferable to a simple, “Meh, it was okay.”
I think a certain portion of the dislike stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the book. Ritualistic Human Sacrifice straddles the razor line between Extreme Horror and Splatterpunk in a way that few books do, and C.V. Hunt has a wicked, so-dark-it’s-obsidian sense of humor that she imbues her fiction with — a satiric style and irony we see more in Bizarro than Horror.
I loved the book. Enough that there’s an entire episode of THE HORROR SHOW WITH BRIAN KEENE about it. (Click here and scroll down to Episode 210).
Ritualistic Human Sacrifice is available in paperback, eBook, and audiobook from Grindhouse Press.
