John Skipp, The Long Last Call Review

Overall Rating

The Long Last Call
John Skipp
Cemetery Dance, April 2005, $40.00, 210 pp.
ISBN 1558761360

In the back yards of America is the strip joint Sweet Thangs, a place where those who have no hope go to and see a stripper, who has no dreams, take off all her clothes. They have no ambition so they have no expectation of bettering themselves, just like Hank who stops there to forget losing the only woman he ever loved. It is almost closing time and the only customers are the regulars who have no other place they would rather be because no one wants them.

In walks a tall dark handsome man who is carrying a suitcase full of money. He tips the strippers excessively, demands they go to more extreme lengths to obtain money. Sex is not what he wants, but he gets what he came for when he touches each person and the slime on his hands goes into their bodies turning them into the people they really are behind their masks. He feeds on their hatred, lusts, anger and sins, as he done for eons. By the end OF THE LONG LAST CALL he expects that everyone will be dead. He is for the first time in millennia surprised at the outcome.

Readers who have a week stomach will not want to read this graphic horror novel. It is a chilling work filled with plenty of violence, gore and depravity, and though the audience keeps wondering who the stranger is, they will make good guesses based on his actions. The people in Sweet Thangs are a microcosm of the malevolence that infects much of the human race, and John Skips brilliantly uses one entity to symbolic that evil. Read THE LONG LAST CALL at your own risk.