"Cockblock" Book Review

The beautiful thing about horror is that amazing writers can make you love things you hate. I was tired of zombies…and John Hornor Jacobs published This Dark Earth. I was tired of werewolves…and Stephen Graham Jones published Mongrels. I am against shitty “hardcore” horror authors using rape as a gimmick to shock readers…and here comes C.V. Hunt, the exact opposite of a shitty edgelord trying to be shocking, and publishes Cockblock, which features rape, and changes everything because the underlying social commentary makes it a must read.

Sonya and Callie are a young couple looking to wind down after a long day. They have a reservation at a nice hotel and look forward to a mellow night together. However, getting there proves to be impossible. Men on the street assault them verbally on their way there and soon the situation escalates to unwanted physical contact. Instead of a relaxing place to have dinner, they use the restaurant as a haven from the testosterone-fueled madness going on in the streets, but their safety is short-lived. Men in the restaurant have also lost their minds. Every man has turned into a rapist. In the midst of chaos, the women discover the cause of the craziness: a hateful message being broadcasted by the President. With every man in the country turned into a vicious sexual predator, the women set out in an adventure to stop the message from being broadcasted.

Let me tell you a bit more about my problem with rape in horror fiction. I don’t think it’s something that’s taboo or should never be done. My problem is that most of the time it’s done by talentless writers who can’t think of anything else to “shock” their readers. If you can’t convey the brutality of rape on something more than a physical level, then you have no business writing about it. Hunt knows what’s up, and the writing in this book proves that abuse here is much more than gimmick:

The sound of her pain cut through the numbness of my anger and I began to sense the anguish I knew would fully manifest once when we were out of this place. The guilt I would feel for not being there to protect her. The guilt of not having experienced the defilement she had. The pain of seeing someone you love suffer and not being able to absorb the anguish for them.

Cockblock works on various levels. For those looking for a wild narrative about survival packed with action, violence, and gore, this one belongs to the same group and Brian Keene’s The Complex. For those in the mood for something that occasionally bridges the gap between horror and humor, this offers some of the worst/funniest one-liners ever uttered by any dudebro. Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, this narrative is one of those that came out of horror in response to the horror in the White House. This is a bloody scream against the grab-them-by-pussy element so prevalent in the contemporary political landscape. It is also a superb book for anyone paying attention to the #MeToo movement. This is not to say that it’s entirely serious, less horrific, or less fun than any other horror book out there; it just means it entertains just as well whole holding up a huge middle finger at patriarchy and delivering a message:

We were women. We all came into this life with a mark against us no matter how advanced our society claimed to be. We’d been abused, turned away from knowledge, rejected from equality, had our intellect dismissed, our judgment questioned, thought of as weak or fragile, told by society we’d never be good enough or smart enough, and our values as human beings were boiled down to our outward appearances and what we could offer the world sexually. The world had never seen us as human. Only as objects and something pretty to look at and fuck. And it infuriated me. Callie died for this. All because she was born with a vagina.

Hunt is one of the most exciting voices in horror. Her work is always weird, dark, brutal, and entertaining. With Cockblock she has one everything we expect her to do and more; bringing in current affairs into the narrative with flair and a ton of attitude. Yes, this is a book where women get raped, but it’s also a book that doesn’t rely on rape to shock the reader. Instead, it is a book that’s part horror, part thriller, part adventure, and part superb revenge narrative. Fans of Hunt will love it, and it offers new readers a perfect place to start if they haven’t discovered her work yet.