Peeler

By Gord Rollo

Randy Baxter is an aspiring chef who dreams of better days ahead. He’s come to work as part of the kitchen staff at Ashbury Creek Asylum, a federally funded institution for the criminally insane. Randy’s not crazy but he does harbor a past filled with psychological issues including the need to cut himself to make the memories of his abusive childhood go away. When he learns about the man they call Peeler, a long term resident at Ashbury who has a severe problem with self-mutilation, all of Randy’s anxieties start to rise to the surface again.

Determined to overcome his inner demons once and for all, he manipulates a face to face meeting with Peeler but as with all things, there’s a price to pay. To see one of the most violent, disturbed men ever to be imprisoned in the maximum security asylum Randy must bring Peeler a small gift. Something no one in their right mind would even think of giving him.

A shiny new razor blade…

Peeler is a novelette at 11K words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: EnemyOne
• Release date: Dec 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502214058

Gord Rollo

Gord Rollo was born in St. Andrews, Scotland, but now lives in Ontario, Canada. His short stories and novella-length work have appeared in many professional publications throughout the genre and his novels include: The Jigsaw Man, Crimson, Strange Magic, Valley Of The Scarecrow, The Translators, Only The Thunder Knows, and The Crucifixion Experiments.. His work has been translated into several languages and his titles are currently being adapted for audiobooks. Besides novels, Gord edited the acclaimed evolutionary horror anthology, Unnatural Selection: A Collection of Darwinian Nightmares. He also co-edited Dreaming of Angels, a horror/fantasy anthology created to increase awareness of Down’s syndrome and raise money for research.

Reviews for Peeler

[edward.lorn · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Gord Rollo seems like a nice enough fellow. I mean, he has a rather pleasant "NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR" section in the back of this story, which is free on Amazon. The problem is, if this story is a sample of his work, I'd rather not read anything else he's written.

First and foremost, Rollo needs an editor like Tom Cruise needs therapy. I will attempt to make my point with examples, but the entire story is broken. These are just a few errors I found:

"...peaked his interest..." should be "...piqued his interest..." This one is early on, but it's only the precursor to many other problems.

Rollo has a problem with commas. Simple rules are broken, as with this bit of dialogue: "I'm kidding man." There should be a comma after "kidding". This happens quite a few times in this short story, but sometimes Rollo screws up and uses the proper comma placement, which makes me sure that he knows the rules but simply doesn't care to follow them at all times. Besides, commas are subjective, right? *cue the crickets*

Then we have this sentence: "This went on for nearly four years, until the month before Randy was turning fourteenth."

This next issue isn't really an error, but I think it speaks volumes: "There wasn't a lot of blood, wasn't squirting out or anything like that, but there was enough that it pooled in the palm of Randy's hand and dripped down onto his torn pajamas." Like I said, not really erroneous, just bad writing. See also: "He was so scared right now he was close to wetting his pants." A simple, "He was close to wetting his pants," would have sufficed. It's boring, but it would have worked better.

"... an stress-induced compulsive..." Is another small error that might have been caught by even a proofread.

Many sentences in this story start with "Of course..." as if we should already know what Rollo is going to tell us. And if we already know, why tell us?

One more for the road: "With a practiced flair, he rubbed his hands together and made a fist with his left hand then blew on it before slowly let his fingers fall open." Le sigh...

Now, if you can get past all that (mind you that's only a small fraction of the errors I found), you are graced with a story so full of holes you could drain pasta with it.

Our main character, Randy, works as a cook in the kitchen of an insane asylum. He hears tell of a patient who likes to peel his own skin off so that he might open a door to another... something. In an attempt to meet this "Peeler", Randy befriends a crazy magician and convinces the man to aid in Randy meeting Peeler. This is where the story becomes nonsensical. In a maximum security asylum, two patients (one with a history of peeling his own skin off) are allowed to meet once a month, alone. During this meeting, Randy is to sneak into the director's basement office that isn't really the director's main office but a side office, kinda like he's cheating on the main office, where Randy is supposed to hide in a closet until the two psychos are left alone for their monthly pow-wow. Now, get this: Randy picks a lock on what the author says is "a sturdy steel door" with a "two-paper-clip method". Have you ever tried picking even a simple lock with a paperclip, much less one on a "sturdy steel door"? Paper clips bend. Easily. Anyway, to top things off, the guard who's left to stand guard outside doesn't have a key to access the door to the office wherein the two crazy people are holding palaver. This is an obvious storytelling device, because he needed time to finish up the insane happenings that occur in said office. Because the guard doesn't have the key, they have to wait on the director to run down from the top floor of the asylum so that he can unlock... You know what? Fuck it. Read it for yourself, or don't. I've probably spent more time on this review than the author did on writing and editing this disaster.

In summation: A reader's time is as valuable as their money. I couldn't care less if this was free. I wasted my time on a story that the author himself didn't seem to care about.

[archivist13 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another over the top story from Gord Rollo. This novella, Peeler, delivered a combination of psychological thriller and horror, complete with minutely detailed gore. If a bucket of pulsing entrails were to suddenly become a book, it would be titled The Peeler. Gord Rollo never disappoints. Not for the squeamish.