“Pins and Needles” is about a man who hides poison and sharp implements in trick-or-treat candy for the banal reason that he dislikes children, and then receives an ironic punishment worthy of an EC horror comic.Ī similar EC-like structure of a build up to a sick-joke punchline, albeit with subject matter that would have been a little touchy even for EC, is “The Abduction”. His fondness for fiction about serial killers turns up in “Mass Appeal”, about an eight-year-old boy who is obsessed with mass murderers and has dreams of spending time with historical evildoers: giving Vlad the Impaler a cake for his birthday, sharing bubblegum with Uncle Adolf and having target practice with Charles Whitman. Nonetheless, the themes of Kelly’s early work are still evident. The remaining stories in the first anthology are comparatively recent, being originally published in either 2008 or 2009. Entitled “Old Hacker” it has a narrator reminiscing about a strange local man who had the disgusting habit of hacking up gobs of spittle – that turned out to be alive.
The other early story in The Sick Stuff shows Kelly’s propensity for the outright bizarre. Maybe someday I’ll call her up at the state asylum and ask her if she remembers why I did such a horrible thing.” After all these years, I still haven’t figured out what my true motives had been. A typical passage: “They sent me to reform school when I was seventeen for cutting off my girlfriend’s breasts with a pocket knife. While this story reserves graphic horror for its very end, “Diary” – about a serial killer sharing memories of his formative years – is less sparing with the visceral details. “Housewarming” is a fairly straightforward ghost story in which a man moves into the house of his deceased aunt, whose lingering presence is symbolised by an infestation of spiders. The first of these, originally published in 2009, includes a few stories from the early nineties when author Ronald Kelly’s career was just beginning. The Essential Sick Stuff is an omnibus edition of three separate collections: The Sick Stuff, More Sick Stuff and Even Sicker Stuff.
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