I may have mentioned a few times that I have a story featured in the Burnt Fur horror anthology. I still do! However, as I've finally had time to read the other stories that accompany mine, I've hit a point where I think I need to put a small disclaimer and/or warning in my recommendations that pepole buy the book.

It's horror, so I don't think saying that one of the stories there is "horrific" will shock anybody. The author went hard for "fucking disturbing" and hit the mark.

The problem is that in the process they have sprayed some additional horror around that some people might not want or expect, even from a horror story.

The story "The Hamford Pigs" is a story that is leaning into the "pig" pun, because it is about cops. It is also by word count probably close to half brutal torture porn whose details do not significantly advance the plot. It could have drawn a curtain over a large section of the story and not changed anything about the reader's understanding of the characters.

It's a horror anthology, so you know, fair enough! I'm not going to judge an erotica collection for gratuitous porn and I'm not going to judge this for gratuitous violence. (Though I will note that thus far it is the only story in the anthology I've read that contains significant violence that could be omitted and change nothing, so...)

In this story (spoilers! I am going to ruin this for you, sorry. The anthology has a ton of other stories, though?) our protagonist is a young policeman, who is drawn into a secret society where it turns out his fellow cops perform brutal, extended, extremely graphic and violent extra-judicial executions of those they have deemed deserving. The man murdered in this tale is a child rapist who was given a light sentence when convicted by the courts. The brutal violence is aided by the "spirits" of real pigs, presumably slaughtered for human food, who hate humans, and so the cops donning their skins and channeling their spirits are goaded to ever more escalating levels of awfulness.

This story absolutely succeeds at being horror.

The events in it are indeed, horrifying, and are presented as such. I wouldn't be bothering to say anything about it, were it not for the ending. At the end of the tale our disturbed protagonist, having brutally tortured a man in truly horrible ways, returns home, debating how he should react. Turn everyone in? Join the club? What should he do, what should he feel? The story then has him see his girlfriend and her child sleeping peacefully, and conclude that he is right and just to join the club and murder people, because making sure the worst criminals are dead will protect them.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT ARE YOU KIDDING ME???????

ahem The story was written something like a year ago at minimum, this anthology took considerable time to come together, so it was not written with the background of current events in mind. Nevertheless it appears to come down hard on the side of justifying police violence and extra-judicial execution as perhaps horrifying, but also in the end moral and necessary.

I felt I needed to say something about that.

I won't say don't buy the book. I won't condemn the author because sometimes you write a story without thinking too hard and it says things you didn't mean. Or sometimes people just don't get what you were going for. Maybe this was the most horrific thing the author could think of and the ending is meant to be the final horror. I don't know. Perhaps our "pig" cuddling up to his love with a feeling of satisfied contentment about the decision he's made was meant to evoke the "Holy fuck that's awful" response it evoked in me! Who knows?

I just felt that I couldn't let this pass unaddressed in this day and age. I don't endorse this story. I don't think that making the victim the worst criminal the author could think of makes it "okay" for somebody who appears to be the "hero" to murder. (And that part there is what leads me to think that the author meant the ending to be straight, not an even-worse-horror twist, because if you want the protagonist to come across as the villain, setting him in opposition to something that our society holds as the worst possible crime doesn't really have that effect!)

So yeah. Just...felt like I needed to say something.