Horror Book Review: Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales (Lee Rozelle)

Welcome to Tallapoochee, a Southern backwater plagued by an experimental toxin that’s turning townsfolk into genetically modified freaks. Follow a puzzling trail of atrocities committed by an enigmatic river cult. Delve into thrilling and funny tales of body horror, bizarro, and the weird. Read the unthinkable testimonies of the living and the dead.

This “water-breaking” collection of twelve intertwined stories combines body horror and Southern Gothic humor in a clash between a cabal of dark scientists and gospel-preaching wrestlers with a secret past. In turns terrifying and bizarre, Lee Rozelle’s new fiction is a shocking journey into murky medicine, conspiracy, and the horrors of watershed destruction.

Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales promises a series of stories to make your stomach churn, set your imagination aflame, and leave you feeling as though you’ve gone through your own personal transformation. A hefty promise that, through clever descriptive storytelling, is well and truly lived up to.

Blending reality and fantasy in horrific Southern style, Lee Rozelle delivers some really disturbing content throughout Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales. Linking the short stories together in clever ways, and bringing the town and its people to life, thanks to the crossover aspects of the stories. Flesh to the bone, just so it can be peeled off in creative and eccentric fashion.

Be under no false illusions, as weird and disturbing as these tales can be, there’s a tongue in cheek approach to the writing. It just so happens to be a mutated tongue in a rotted cheek. This aspect gives some levity to the stories, and at times, it can be quite welcoming. Even if it requires you, the reader, to have some kind of twisted mind. Especially as the goal of the entirety of the book seems to be to try and gross the reader out. Which, in the case of a few, will certainly happen.

In fact, there’s a sense of ramping up per tale, and what begins in more quirky fashion, ends up being quite outrageous by the end. With most of the stories focusing on some form of body horror and supernatural aspect, it’s like Rozelle is daring you to read on, and should you, the author seeks new sickening depths to plumb to put a stop to your curiosity once and for all.

Read on, many will, as what starts off fairly ordinary (Lyle and the Space Man) becomes compelling (Lord of the Fishes), terrifying (Cakewalk), unnerving (Foundling), and detailed (Hydromaniacs: A Novelette). This particular story, the finale, is where Rozelle uses more pages and words to flesh out a more distinct plot, and while it changes the book formula, it coming at the end ensures it ends up being a wholly satisfying read.

Which sums up the entire book overall. Imaginative and memorable, thought-provoking at times, and deeply sickening at others, much of the imagery that Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales creates will stay with the reader for a long time afterwards.

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