We had been introduced years before, by a mutual friend named Clive Barker at the time, Phil was working at the BBC and pursuing dreams of filmmaking. It was called “Wet Work.”Īlthough it was Phil’s first published story, he was not an unknown to me, or to horror. Its stories included a gory set-piece by Philip Nutman that traced the lurching path of zombies through the streets of the nation’s capital and straight into the White House. Its stories raged, sometimes merely for the sake of rage, but more often against the Reaganite dream of conformity and materialism-and, indeed, against the increasingly safe and commercial genre that was attempting to pass for “horror” fiction.īook of the Dead was published in 1989. Romero-and, in the words of its introduction, the aesthetics of “going too far”-the volume remains one of the more memorable manifestos of splatter. Intended as a celebration of the “living dead” films of George A. At splatterpunk’s fierce apogee, before its original question (how far could you go?) was replaced by the inevitable one (how low could you go?), writers John Skipp and Craig Spector assembled an anthology known as Book of the Dead. Meat writhing with maggots.” Apocalypse, then and now: The novel you are about to read had its genesis late in the 1980s, during the halcyon days of “splatterpunk”-a flashfire of horrific fiction that exploited excesses of violence and sex with unrepentant glee. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Wet Work by Philip Nutman