'I start the year with a pounding in my skull and the lingering taste of alcohol on my tongue. Lena, the Swedish exchange student I picked up in Bonaparte’s last night, is lying bound, naked and bloody on the floor before me...' And so begins Aspects of a Psychopath a novel by new author Alistair Langston. Aspects of a Psychopath is a fast-paced novella of 40,000 words. Certainly not for the screamish!Reviews of Aspects of a Psychopath‘This is meat and potatoes and sharp knives and that which even I feel uncomfortable writing about. The low-key approach gives Langston's novel a certain oily power. If you make it past paragraph one, plan on spending the night awake, and finishing up with a long shower. Or two. Or more. Soiled only begins to describe how you'll feel upon finishing this novel.’Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column Book Reviews & Commentary‘Imagine A Clockwork Orange shorn of its cinematic and literary sophistication, almost as if Lucio Fulci or Shaun Hutson reworked it. The new version would avoid the stylistic and linguistic niceties, but it would focus more on the raw emotion, the visceral intensity. It would revel in the aspects that that the more refined eyes of Kubrick and Burgess turned away from; Aspects of a psychopath is definitely not for the easily shocked. But it is, on the whole, a successful novella that's well worth reading.’Mark Greener, The Alien Online‘We are offered the diary of a killer, one who takes a victim, stores her in a closet, and then mutilates and kills her in graphic fashion. The killer (he goes by the name of Saul Roberts) then cuts up the body, puts it in his fridge, and then uses the meat for various meals throughout the rest of the text. Roberts is hardly done there, however. He tells of multiple victims in the course of the diary, as well as his relationship with Laura, whom Saul tolerates to live.’Chris Przybyszewskie, The SF Site‘Hard-horror fiction… this novella is a diary-format story of a year in the life of a serial killer, whose heinous crimes are clearly intended to shock. What's most scary here, as in all the best such works, is not the gruesome descriptions but the manner in which the villain blends into normal society (albeit the lowlife variety) and is subsequently overlooked or ignored, or worse, accepted.’Dragon's Breath
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