A review by chramies
Creekers by Edward Lee

4.0

Classic gore and weirdness-driven horror from the master of upchuck fiction Ed Lee. I've read a fair few of his novels before getting to this one, but missed it because it looked like "The Backwoods" - which is the wrong way round. "The Backwoods" has some similar themes but isn't anywhere near as good. "Creekers" with its red-eyed mutants and disgraced smalltown cop character and an edge-of-nowhere setting that has something in common with his more recent hicksville settings, but they have turned for the most part folksy and with the nature of the tall tale about them in recent years. "Creekers" ain't that. It is flat-out whores 'n' gore stuff with more twists 'n a rattler. Certain themes recur: the big old house in the middle of nowhere with a doorknocker in the form of a noseless and mouthless face (which makes more sense here than it does in other places he's repeated the motif), the down-on-his luck former policeman (makes sense because at some point you know he's going to come out guns blazing, at least metaphorically. In a sense this makes many of Ed Lee's novels Westerns). There is a certain similarity with another of his classic novels but I won't say what as it would give the game away, indeed that work may be here in embryo but it is a mutant and red-eyed embryo if it is. And a point at which he and proto-bizarro novelist Harry Stephen Keeler might have seen common cause: the bordello catering to strange and depraved tastes. And how depraved they are, these Creekers and those who go to them. I am off to Spain shortly in search of a lost race of mountain dwarfs (who seem to be very much a Found Race, I think; the area has adopted them as a motif, though they are all gone). I do not hope to find what is here, there.