I loved the premise of violence that springs out of boredom or depression, echoing Kierkegaard's idea that “Boredom is the root of all evil.” Triana points out that his experience with bipolar depression bled into the first pages of the novel, when Kim is described as suffering from suicidal ideation, and seasonal affective disorder among other things; she loves that darkness of winter and hates summer, which might seem weird but I can relate to. Everything seems gray and repetitive to Kim but the only thing that brings a splash of color and joy into her life is torture and sexual depravity. After fucking one of her teachers she becomes pregnant but that doesn’t stop her from ruining the teacher and his family. Now, one of my ideas was that Triana could have stopped here and delved into Kim’s conflicted psyche. Fighting depression with violence and dealing with an unwanted pregnancy has all the ingredients of a solid horror story. The pregnancy and unavoidable arrival of spring and summer would only intensify Kim’s dark moods which, in turn, would require deeper plunges into aggression and depravity. Also, given Kim’s elitist outlook, getting impregnated by a nobody would amplify her self-loathing and make her have an abortion, even a self-induced one. These are severe issues that are bound to plague a conflicted teen like Kim and aren’t fully explored in the novel, which detracts from his value and plausibility. Instead, Triana decides to up the ante by adding that the fetus growing inside Kim is a cannibal that would eat her from the inside unless it’s fed human meat. I sensed that the ante didn’t need upping with such a far-fetched addition, and all the psychological drama and horror were there to be explored even if the baby was perfectly normal. While the addition of cannibalism to the story might increase its shock value, it takes away from its artistic value and plausibility. The first part of the novel opens up some narrative venues that are abruptly closed off when the cannibal fetus enters the stage. The ennui and anguish that plague Kim are always mentioned but never shown in her actions. She’s always engaged in sadistic planning, she’s never empty, paralyzed by meaninglessness, zombified, lazy, and destitute like the truly depressed. Triana doesn’t delve into that nihilistic outlook like he does in his novel They All Died Screaming. And that, I think, is a missed opportunity.
This brings me to a point about splatterpunk in general, an idea that echoes some social media posts by Wrath James White. Novels like Jack Ketchum’s The Lost, or The Girl Next Door, or Red offer exquisite psychological portraits that expose the evil in human nature in a realistic framework. Now, a lot of newer splatterpunk, let’s say, Aron Beauregard, sacrifices that psychological realism for the cheaper shock value of the fictional equivalent of ‘80s horror movies. There’s definite artistic merit to both of these trends but they seem to be very different writing paradigms, despite the gray area in between. I feel that Full Brutal started in the first paradigm and then switched to the second one, failing to live up to the more complex and promising beginning. For lack of a better analogy, it was like wanting to see Amadeus and ending up with Basket Case.
