HOT SPLICES features eight interwoven tales about the Film Addicts, the flicker freaks, the Cinephages – they devour film for the high, to connect to the art on the granular level…the bleeding perforations in their skin is just part of the game.
There are five forbidden films, when run together, can induce madness, or release the Dark Gods that created them, speaking through the psychopathic director.
There is a man on the run, with a lost movie that others would kill to obtain. He barely escaped with his life.
There is a tower, once housing for students, now a crumbling, rotting monument to film history, and the men and women who returned to the tower, to die watching their favorite films.
Beneath the tower, there lies something made of light and shadow. It does not love its worshipers…
If you do not love film…
If you do not wish to devour it as it devours you…
If all you seek from film is entertainment…
…This is not the book for you.
My Thoughts
Mike Watt has penned an atmospheric and highly immersive horror novel that leaps at you with gore from the prologue’s first paragraph. The story then unfolds in a pleasingly noir vein, all taut clean prose, as Watt takes his readers behind the scenes of old-style movie making and on a journey through its history. The author knows his subject. But Hot Splices is less an exposé of film making and the industry that surrounds it – and there is plenty of that in this setting rich novel – and more a fantastical horror journey involving flixing, in which scenes of a movie are absorbed quite literally through allowing the emulsion on the celluloid to absorb on the tongue, somewhat like dropping acid.
Hot Splices is a fast-paced and compulsive read. At the end there are three short stories that relate to the main tale. The whole is original in conception and masterfully constructed. The characters are well-drawn and the pacing and plot twists executed with an eye on the ball. I especially enjoyed the concept of mixing the flixing, a bit like mixing your drugs, as protagonist Tom Boone, an addict from his teenaged years, imbibes various combinations of old films, a habit with startling consequences.
A unique, highly readable and provocative novel, Hot Splices is a must read for horror lovers and dark sci fi lovers alike. The sort of novel that warrants a second read. Highly recommended.
About the Author
Mike Watt is a writer, journalist and screenwriter. He has written for such publications as Fangoria, Film Threat, The Dark Side, the late Frederick Clarke’s Cinefantastique, Femme Fatales and served as editor for the RAK Media Group’s resurrection of Sirens of Cinema.
Through the production company, Happy Cloud Pictures, he has written and produced or directed the award-winning feature film The Resurrection Game, as well as Splatter Movie: The Director’s Cut, A Feast of Flesh, Demon Divas and the Lanes of Damnation and the award-winning Razor Days.
He is the author of the short fiction collection, Phobophobia, the novels The Resurrection Game and Suicide Machine, and from McFarland Publishing: Fervid Filmmaking: 66 Cult Pictures of Vision, Verve and No Self-Restraint. In 2014, he launched the acclaimed Movie Outlaw book series, focusing on “underseen cinema”. He is also the editor-in-chief of the bi-annual publication, Exploitation Nation.
Through Happy Cloud Media, LLC, he edits and publishes 42nd Street Pete’s Grindhouse Purgatory Magazine, as well as Pete’s autobiography, “A Whole Bag of Crazy”.
In 2017, he edited the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD novelization by John Russo, and the 40th Anniversary printing of Paul Schrader’s TAXI DRIVER screenplay, featuring a new interview with Robert De Niro, published in 2018 by Gauntlet Press.
Isobel Blackthorn is an award-winning author of unique and engaging fiction. She writes gripping mysteries, dark psychological thrillers and historical fiction. She is the author of The Unlikely Occultist: a biographical novel of Alice A. Bailey.