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screamweaver's review against another edition
5.0
Depraved in the best of ways and oddly funny. It even had a few moments that made me a bit ill, the best kind! Worth a read if you like this genre.
sea_caummisar's review against another edition
4.0
The Bible does say an eye for an eye right? Does that also mean header for header?
I loved this book so much. At first, the redneck language was hard to decipher, but a few pages in and it was easy to read.
Recap: Travis gets out of prison. He goes to stay with his Granddad, who teaches him what a header is.
Meanwhile, a crooked cop on the take (drugs) wants to find the murderers.
This book was so much fun. The end was the best part! I cannot praise this book enough. If you like the stuff that makes nightmares, I recommend you read this book
I loved this book so much. At first, the redneck language was hard to decipher, but a few pages in and it was easy to read.
Recap: Travis gets out of prison. He goes to stay with his Granddad, who teaches him what a header is.
Meanwhile, a crooked cop on the take (drugs) wants to find the murderers.
This book was so much fun. The end was the best part! I cannot praise this book enough. If you like the stuff that makes nightmares, I recommend you read this book
skullheadface's review against another edition
5.0
I finally got to read Header. Jesus fucking Christ Almighty it was awesome. Better late than never, thats for sure. This book, well, you know. Devoured in one big fat reading session with a few bongs sprinkled in. Whooo doggie.
5/5 Skulls
☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️
5/5 Skulls
☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️
modernzorker's review against another edition
4.0
"Answer the question. What's a header?"
Another spit, another sigh, then Pierce came clean. "A header's the worst thing these rubes out here could think of. It's like the law of the hills. Someone does ya wrong bad enough, then yer justified ta do the worse thing imaginable fer yer revenge. That's what a header is. Folks don't talk about it much, it's just somethin' that's understood. Yer gettin' all whipped up 'bout somethin' that's been going on fer generations."
Cummings closed his eyes, took a deep breath himself now. "J.L.. you're telling me that that's what this is all about? Hill people feuding?"
"That's right, boy, so don't'cha gripe 'cos you was the one who asked. It's one-uppin', like I said."
* * * * *
Edward Lee has one of the sickest, most twisted imaginations of any published author I've ever come across. The reigning king of both shock fiction and hillbilly horror, one gets the impression Lee giddily arranges words on the page for the sole purpose of making readers say, "What the actual fuck?!" every couple of paragraphs, then read on, anxious to see how it could possibly get any worse, only to wish they hadn't.
That said, if you ever looked at Deliverance and thought, "Man, what that movie really needed was more non-consensual hillbilly humping than a West Virginia family reunion, with a healthy dose of Human Centipede-level grotesque depravity for good measure", then boy howdy, have I got some good news: you now know the name "Edward Lee".
Header is nefarious among the Splatterpunk or "extreme" horror scene. It was originally published in 1995, as a 100-page chapbook format by Necro Press. It went out of print in a very short period of time, and copies of the original sell for absurd amounts of money on the collector's market. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on the strength of your stomach) Deadite Press published a reprint in 2012, in both physical and ebook formats, making it far more accessible to the readers who wondered what all the fuss was about.
Header is the story of two main protagonists, neither of whom can easily be called "the good guy". Something you'll learn if you venture into reading other Lee material is that it's very hard to find anybody within the pages to actually root for. If you're the sort who can watch a slasher film and cheer every time a teenager with more boobs than sense takes a machete to the neckmeat, that's the approach you have to take with Lee's writing. Best then to simply root for Lee himself to come up with ever more disturbing and depraved ways to have his characters heap injury upon insult and make sure your tongue never emerges from your cheek.
Stewart Cummings is an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms who finds himself in the middle of backwoods Appalachia where running down the occasional illegal moonshine operation is about the extent of his day's excitement. His wife is extremely ill, and his salary is failing to keep up with her rising medical expenses, so he has turned to the dark side, passing information to local drug dealers to ensure they can send their shipments via safe routes. Everything is golden, until bodies of local women start turning up dumped in public places, and violated in ways too awful to describe. He's told to back off the case, as these things tend to run their course and there's no need to waste time and money following up on somebody's sense of backwoods justice. As more bodies pile up, however, he finds himself unable to let it go, at least until he finds out what exactly a 'header' is, and who's decided to start the tradition up again.
This, unfortunately, will put him on a collision course with Travis Tuckton, a man fresh out of an 11-year stint in prison, who finds himself back home in rural Kentucky with no place to live, no job prospects, and only his old, footless grandfather to rely on. Times have been especially hard for his clan, what with the deaths of his parents and many of his old friends while he was doing time, but Grandpappy puts a roof over his head and gives him a place to stay while he's getting back on his feet. He also answers the question which has been burning in Travis's brain for over a decade: "What's a header?" Once Travis learns the answer to the riddle tormenting him since his childhood, he realizes that there are a great many folk in his neck of the woods in need of some payback. And a header? Why, that sounds like just the way to get back at all the assholes who done his family wrong these last eleven years.
One man who won't stop until he finds out what a header is, and another who can't stop now that he knows. When they collide, it's gonna be messy. Hell, it's gonna be messy no matter what happens, cuz once you've had yourself a header, why boy, there ain't nothing better 'n all the world than that. Kinda like them Lays tater chips they sell at the gas station--ya cain't stop at jus' one.
* * * * *
There's really no way to sugar-coat this.
I don't recommend Edward Lee to anybody. Not because I think he's a bad writer or anything, but because I have a hard enough time making friends that I'd like to keep the few I've managed to hoodwink. If you don't have a strong stomach, if you cannot handle gleefully graphic depictions of depravity, if Stephen King's work keeps you up at night, then you have no business getting anywhere close to Edward Lee. Even if I piqued your curiosity in my steadfast refusal to reveal what a 'header' is, I don't recommend you go looking unless you want to hate yourself.
On the other hand, if you watched A Serbian Film and somehow didn't feel like you needed a long shower afterwards...if you read American Psycho and thought, "That wasn't violent enough!"...if you devoured Ryan Harding's Genital Grinder and wondered where all the really sick shit was that everybody talked about, then Edward Lee just might be your guy. If you're going to start somewhere, you might as well start here, since at only 100 pages it's actually one of his more restrained works.
I can't believe I just typed that sentence, but here we are.
I don't recommend that you, or anybody else, read Header. If you choose to ignore my recommendation, that's fine--just don't say I didn't warn your redneck-humpin' ass first.
Best Scene:
Nominating a scene in Header as "the best" would be as crass on my part as flipping through a slideshow of road fatalities and grading them like an Olympic sport. There is no 'best scene' in Header. It's one long, painfully drawn out litany of stomach-churning suffering and slaughter. Open to a random page and you'll be treated to people humping things that shouldn't be humped, talking about humping things that shouldn't be humped, eating things that shouldn't be eaten, or talking about eating things that shouldn't be eaten. Sometimes all at the same time. If Lee wasn't such a damn clever, intelligent, and inventive writer, there would be no excuse for Header to exist. The thing is, Lee is exactly that clever, intelligent, and inventive...he's just chosen to focus his talent on what folks get up to in the privacy of their own rotted tar paper shacks.
Works like Header exist beyond simple concepts like 'rating systems', so any number or star value assigned to it, even the four I gave it, becomes instantly meaningless. It's a story that can only be judged on its own merits and the abilities of the man who penned it. Trying to make it in any way relate-able to the general public or any other work of fiction for that matter, is an exercise in futility.
You've been warned.
Edit: I totally neglected to mention that this was actually turned into a movie back in 2006. I've not seen it, so I have no idea how faithful an adaptation it is, or how good the production values are, but I have SOOOOOO many questions. Chief among them: HOW?!
Second edit: I also neglected to mention that Header has received not one, but two sequels. Whoever is out there encouraging this behavior, I'm gonna need you to stop. :D
Another spit, another sigh, then Pierce came clean. "A header's the worst thing these rubes out here could think of. It's like the law of the hills. Someone does ya wrong bad enough, then yer justified ta do the worse thing imaginable fer yer revenge. That's what a header is. Folks don't talk about it much, it's just somethin' that's understood. Yer gettin' all whipped up 'bout somethin' that's been going on fer generations."
Cummings closed his eyes, took a deep breath himself now. "J.L.. you're telling me that that's what this is all about? Hill people feuding?"
"That's right, boy, so don't'cha gripe 'cos you was the one who asked. It's one-uppin', like I said."
* * * * *
Edward Lee has one of the sickest, most twisted imaginations of any published author I've ever come across. The reigning king of both shock fiction and hillbilly horror, one gets the impression Lee giddily arranges words on the page for the sole purpose of making readers say, "What the actual fuck?!" every couple of paragraphs, then read on, anxious to see how it could possibly get any worse, only to wish they hadn't.
That said, if you ever looked at Deliverance and thought, "Man, what that movie really needed was more non-consensual hillbilly humping than a West Virginia family reunion, with a healthy dose of Human Centipede-level grotesque depravity for good measure", then boy howdy, have I got some good news: you now know the name "Edward Lee".
Header is nefarious among the Splatterpunk or "extreme" horror scene. It was originally published in 1995, as a 100-page chapbook format by Necro Press. It went out of print in a very short period of time, and copies of the original sell for absurd amounts of money on the collector's market. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on the strength of your stomach) Deadite Press published a reprint in 2012, in both physical and ebook formats, making it far more accessible to the readers who wondered what all the fuss was about.
Header is the story of two main protagonists, neither of whom can easily be called "the good guy". Something you'll learn if you venture into reading other Lee material is that it's very hard to find anybody within the pages to actually root for. If you're the sort who can watch a slasher film and cheer every time a teenager with more boobs than sense takes a machete to the neckmeat, that's the approach you have to take with Lee's writing. Best then to simply root for Lee himself to come up with ever more disturbing and depraved ways to have his characters heap injury upon insult and make sure your tongue never emerges from your cheek.
Stewart Cummings is an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms who finds himself in the middle of backwoods Appalachia where running down the occasional illegal moonshine operation is about the extent of his day's excitement. His wife is extremely ill, and his salary is failing to keep up with her rising medical expenses, so he has turned to the dark side, passing information to local drug dealers to ensure they can send their shipments via safe routes. Everything is golden, until bodies of local women start turning up dumped in public places, and violated in ways too awful to describe. He's told to back off the case, as these things tend to run their course and there's no need to waste time and money following up on somebody's sense of backwoods justice. As more bodies pile up, however, he finds himself unable to let it go, at least until he finds out what exactly a 'header' is, and who's decided to start the tradition up again.
This, unfortunately, will put him on a collision course with Travis Tuckton, a man fresh out of an 11-year stint in prison, who finds himself back home in rural Kentucky with no place to live, no job prospects, and only his old, footless grandfather to rely on. Times have been especially hard for his clan, what with the deaths of his parents and many of his old friends while he was doing time, but Grandpappy puts a roof over his head and gives him a place to stay while he's getting back on his feet. He also answers the question which has been burning in Travis's brain for over a decade: "What's a header?" Once Travis learns the answer to the riddle tormenting him since his childhood, he realizes that there are a great many folk in his neck of the woods in need of some payback. And a header? Why, that sounds like just the way to get back at all the assholes who done his family wrong these last eleven years.
One man who won't stop until he finds out what a header is, and another who can't stop now that he knows. When they collide, it's gonna be messy. Hell, it's gonna be messy no matter what happens, cuz once you've had yourself a header, why boy, there ain't nothing better 'n all the world than that. Kinda like them Lays tater chips they sell at the gas station--ya cain't stop at jus' one.
* * * * *
There's really no way to sugar-coat this.
I don't recommend Edward Lee to anybody. Not because I think he's a bad writer or anything, but because I have a hard enough time making friends that I'd like to keep the few I've managed to hoodwink. If you don't have a strong stomach, if you cannot handle gleefully graphic depictions of depravity, if Stephen King's work keeps you up at night, then you have no business getting anywhere close to Edward Lee. Even if I piqued your curiosity in my steadfast refusal to reveal what a 'header' is, I don't recommend you go looking unless you want to hate yourself.
On the other hand, if you watched A Serbian Film and somehow didn't feel like you needed a long shower afterwards...if you read American Psycho and thought, "That wasn't violent enough!"...if you devoured Ryan Harding's Genital Grinder and wondered where all the really sick shit was that everybody talked about, then Edward Lee just might be your guy. If you're going to start somewhere, you might as well start here, since at only 100 pages it's actually one of his more restrained works.
I can't believe I just typed that sentence, but here we are.
I don't recommend that you, or anybody else, read Header. If you choose to ignore my recommendation, that's fine--just don't say I didn't warn your redneck-humpin' ass first.
Best Scene:
Nominating a scene in Header as "the best" would be as crass on my part as flipping through a slideshow of road fatalities and grading them like an Olympic sport. There is no 'best scene' in Header. It's one long, painfully drawn out litany of stomach-churning suffering and slaughter. Open to a random page and you'll be treated to people humping things that shouldn't be humped, talking about humping things that shouldn't be humped, eating things that shouldn't be eaten, or talking about eating things that shouldn't be eaten. Sometimes all at the same time. If Lee wasn't such a damn clever, intelligent, and inventive writer, there would be no excuse for Header to exist. The thing is, Lee is exactly that clever, intelligent, and inventive...he's just chosen to focus his talent on what folks get up to in the privacy of their own rotted tar paper shacks.
Works like Header exist beyond simple concepts like 'rating systems', so any number or star value assigned to it, even the four I gave it, becomes instantly meaningless. It's a story that can only be judged on its own merits and the abilities of the man who penned it. Trying to make it in any way relate-able to the general public or any other work of fiction for that matter, is an exercise in futility.
You've been warned.
Edit: I totally neglected to mention that this was actually turned into a movie back in 2006. I've not seen it, so I have no idea how faithful an adaptation it is, or how good the production values are, but I have SOOOOOO many questions. Chief among them: HOW?!
Second edit: I also neglected to mention that Header has received not one, but two sequels. Whoever is out there encouraging this behavior, I'm gonna need you to stop. :D
vikingwolf's review against another edition
3.0
This is a typically twisted horror novel from Edward Lee and is not for the fainthearted or easily offended. It was one of his more entertaining novels in a twisted sort of way!
Stew is a cop who is forced to go on the take and get involved in drug deals to pay for his girlfriend's rising medical bills. He also gets caught up in a spate of murders where the victims have had holes drilled in the head and brain, which are then used for rape. Travis and his psycho grandpa use 'headers' as the ultimate revenge against other families who have done them wrong.
I liked the trouble that Stew manages to get himself into and the twist at the end where he realises that he has been conned. Entertaining gory and violent read.
Stew is a cop who is forced to go on the take and get involved in drug deals to pay for his girlfriend's rising medical bills. He also gets caught up in a spate of murders where the victims have had holes drilled in the head and brain, which are then used for rape. Travis and his psycho grandpa use 'headers' as the ultimate revenge against other families who have done them wrong.
I liked the trouble that Stew manages to get himself into and the twist at the end where he realises that he has been conned. Entertaining gory and violent read.
helpfulsnowman's review against another edition
3.0
If you challenged someone to come up with the most disgusting thing you could think of, and if you then wrote a novella with that disgusting thing as the central premise, you'd have something like the beginnings of Header.
I put this one in the category of gross horror. The premise and execution are pretty grimy, and the descriptions don't back down. But it's all more gross than it is frightening. Or maybe it's frightening in that it's so gross.
Really, the weirdest part of this whole thing is reading it at the bus stop, being involved in this fictional world while everyone else around you is seemingly going about their normal business in a normal way. It's like you found this little pocket of total fucked-up-ness, and you're in it while the rest of the world is completely unaware.
It's good to be in those spots now and then. I like to compare it to the first time I rode a motorcycle out on the road. It's fun, but it's pretty weird the first time you come to a stoplight. You're sitting there on a bike while everyone else is in a car. Your feet are touching the ground while you wait, and you feel the heat from the blacktop through the bottoms of your shoes. You're all of a sudden in this weird, parallel dimension where things are mostly the same, but not quite.
I put this one in the category of gross horror. The premise and execution are pretty grimy, and the descriptions don't back down. But it's all more gross than it is frightening. Or maybe it's frightening in that it's so gross.
Really, the weirdest part of this whole thing is reading it at the bus stop, being involved in this fictional world while everyone else around you is seemingly going about their normal business in a normal way. It's like you found this little pocket of total fucked-up-ness, and you're in it while the rest of the world is completely unaware.
It's good to be in those spots now and then. I like to compare it to the first time I rode a motorcycle out on the road. It's fun, but it's pretty weird the first time you come to a stoplight. You're sitting there on a bike while everyone else is in a car. Your feet are touching the ground while you wait, and you feel the heat from the blacktop through the bottoms of your shoes. You're all of a sudden in this weird, parallel dimension where things are mostly the same, but not quite.
rajneet's review against another edition
I just couldn't do with this language and even the murder/gore part is just repeat. Did not feel anything for any character
corcordium's review against another edition
3.75
really fucked up and disgusting and i actually really liked the ending
laurelinwonder's review against another edition
4.0
This was a foray into extreme horror, that I heard about back when it came out, but finally got around to. It's not for everyone, if the words extreme horror sound terrible to you you can move right along. those of you who like extreme horror, this really needs to be in the top 10. Edward Lee is well known because he knows what he's doing, the writing's good, it's actually kind of funny, if you can get over the incredibly gory aspects. however, it does make fun of backwater hillbilly types, so if that is not your bag, in similar veins as wrong turn and the hills have eyes if we're talking movies. so be aware of that if that's something that is troubling to you. So here's the deal, this was nasty, you had my get turning, and yet some of the conversations actually had me laughing because they were so ridiculous. But after reading Jack ketchum's introduction to the story, that seems to be Lee's kick, he likes to laugh, so I tried to keep my mind open while I was reading for that kind of humor. so if you're looking for it it's there, if you're looking to just be incredibly grossed out crack this one open.