BOOK REVIEW: The Country Club by Tim Miller

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Confession time: I am freaked out by the thought of being tortured. Spiders, clowns, nude Hillary Clinton photos … none of these things make me shiver. But the thought of being strapped down and unable to move while some sick psycho scoops out my eyeballs with a rusty spoon … yeah, that kind of nastiness crawls right under my skin and stays there. So a movie like Hostel hits the right horror notes for me.

The same thing applies when reading Tim Miller’s The Country Club, because there is no dodging the fact that the book borrows heavily from Hostel. It’s not the soulless rip-off that some critics have claimed, but the word “homage” can definitely be applied. But hey, who cares? Nothing new under the sun and all that jazz, right? What really matters is whether or not the story entertains and as long as you count yourself among the extreme horror demographic, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

What this book does better than the film that seems to have inspired it is get right down to the bloody business. While Hostel took an eternity plus an eon to deliver the good stuff, The Country Club ain’t got time for that. It hits the ground full-throttle, no foreplay, no mucking about—we came here for literary torture-porn and, the gods of gore bless him, that’s what Miller gives us without any teasing around the proverbial bush. No need to slog through 300 pages of dull filler before someone gets their molars power-drilled sans Novocain.

Miller puts his stripped down, no frills, matter-of-fact style to good use here as he details the strap-'em-down-and-make-'em-bleed torments of the titular club. Scalping, cannibalism, starving rats, dismemberment, power sander mayhem … the plethora of punishments dished out by the wealthy clients will make you cringe. In fact, one scene in particular, involving a newborn baby, arguably goes too far (Miller admits to receiving mega hate mail regarding this sequence) and may justifiably be a gag-inducing deal-breaker for some readers. Not since the infant scene in JF Gonzalez’s Survivor has a horror scene hit me this hard.

That said, this is extreme horror, and lines are meant to be crossed, taboos violated, good taste thrown out the window along with the contents of the barf bucket. Reading an extreme horror novel and then complaining about disgusting stuff is like picking up a Dr. Seuss book and complaining that it rhymes. In other words, you should know what to expect and if you pick up a Tim Miller novel expecting something tame, prepare to have your expectations effed up seven ways from Sunday.

Listen, Miller ain't for everybody. Heck, some would say he shouldn’t be for anybody. But if you can handle it raw and rough, he may just put a big ol' smile on your face ... or across your throat. You don’t need to have guts to read Tim Miller … he’ll provide them for you.