Ira Rat’s introduction to New Meat in a Clean Room is disarmingly candid. He reels off his influences in one long, unfiltered paragraph: Mark Fisher, J. G. Ballard, Joy Division, Francis Bacon, Nan Goldin, Clive Barker, The Cure, No Wave cinema, Cindy Sherman, William S. Burroughs, Siouxsie Sioux, Gregg Araki, Poppy Z. Brite, and many more. The list feels like a private obsession finally shared rather than a calculated pose. Rat even confesses that he is not even sure what the phrase he used when first contracting writers for this project—“hauntological overtones”—even means; it simply captured the mood he wanted. That candor sets the tone for the entire book. The six stories that follow do not merely nod to those influences; they absorb them and produce something remarkably unified. This is not a loose collection of extreme horror. It is a deliberate suite in which post-punk alienation, splatterpunk violence, and hauntological looping converge on the body as the last contested territory. Clean rooms turn filthy. Privacy dissolves. History leaks through the walls like black bile. There is no warmth here, no redemption, only a cold, surgical clarity.
Edwin Callihan’s “Angelhood & Abscission” is the longest story and the one that most explicitly builds the anthology’s shared world. The piece is framed as a series of letters from an unnamed narrator newly arrived in a vast brutalist city. The architecture is rendered with obsessive detail: Buildings rise on “colorless columns and flying buttresses rounded by cylindrical obelisks, spackled with tiny little windows like the outside was hit with buckshot” (p. 10). The narrator finds a sparse apartment with a couch, a microwave, TV dinners, and a television that only catches static or late-night sign-off patterns. The prose circles in the way genuine fixation does. Early on, the narrator visits a bar called Sefer, where a “band” manipulates a chrome box that emits “clanky, metallic groans and whimpers” (p. 8) while oily yolk drips from the stage. He meets Bill, a tall man with a bowl cut and a face covered in red boils, who speaks with a whistling “w.” He is later introduced to The Sculptor, who keeps hundreds of sheet-draped figures in a red-lit basement beneath a twenty-four-hour copy shop. The figures are malformed, not quite human, with blue veins running across marble-like skin. When the narrator reaches to touch one, The Sculptor slaps his hand away and retches. The realization arrives gradually and inescapably: The narrator is being sculpted, too. Callihan balances cosmic detachment with intimate physical detail. Lines like “[b]etween heaven and hell is an orifice, a puckering asshole shitting us out into wherever” (p. 24) land with cosmic revulsion. The closing ascent to the lunar surface—during which the narrator looks down at the city “blinking like Christmas lights” (p. 24) and understands there may be countless versions of himself “plucked and discarded again and again” —is both grotesque and quietly devastating. The repetitive, hypnotic prose mirrors the narrator’s growing dissociation, making the reader feel the slow erosion of self in real time.
Sam Richard’s “Red Tears Are Shed on Grey” shifts to a fragmented, almost cinematic style. Sections marked “C” intercut loops of historical atrocity footage—missiles rising in “tumescent power” (p. 26), faceless soldiers marching, factory fires, hanging bodies, endless ejaculation overlays—with the story of Sasha, a young woman smoking outside an illegal basement venue called the Rat’s Nest. The Karl Marx epigraph about dead generations weighing like a nightmare is structural rather than decorative. The footage is rendered with clinical detachment: faces scratched out, flags clipped, pilots with faces removed. Sasha listens to a strange man reminisce about the venue’s past as an underground library filled with suppressed radical texts and do-it-yourself guides. The conversation unsettles her. When she returns home, the loops invade her reality. She finds herself strapped to a chair by invisible restraints, forced to watch versions of herself on a filthy projector screen. Her face tears open. Blood pours. Tears bleach the screen white. Richard refuses catharsis. The story ends in vacancy and fraying film. The formal choices—abrupt cuts, smokeless cigarettes, eternal ember—create a disorienting rhythm that mirrors Sasha’s unraveling. History is not past; it is a corrupted reel projecting itself onto living flesh until identity dissolves.
Charlene Elsby’s “I’m Not Coming After Her” is the emotional and philosophical heart of the collection. The narrator is the surviving twin speaking from inside the womb after her sister Millie has been delivered and harvested for organs. Elsby writes with extraordinary precision. We feel the initial warmth and nutriment that convinced both twins their mother wanted them to live. We feel the shift when the technician explains that Millie cannot survive independently and that her viable parts could save other babies. The mother’s relief is immediate and physical: “the relief of not having to have two daughters after all, and that it would be through no fault of her own” (p. 49). The surviving twin experiences every scalpel cut, every cold disposal of unusable parts labeled “biological materials.” The decision to remain inside and fester, rather than enter a world that treats bodies as spare parts, is presented without melodrama: “All I must do is fester,” the narrator repeats like a verdict. The story reframes the womb as a battlefield and asks, without sentimentality, whether any world that dismantles you for parts is worth joining. Elsby’s philosophical density never sacrifices visceral immediacy, however. The final description of infected tissue turning gray as blood retreats is one of the most haunting images in contemporary horror. The first-person perspective from inside the womb creates an intimacy that makes the betrayal feel personal.
Joe Koch’s “I Am a Horse” begins in apparently realistic territory and descends into prolonged bodily transformation. An aging mathematics professor, Mr. Sapin, becomes obsessed with a Butoh dancer he first mistakes for a statue in a garden. The story is structured in numbered encounters that escalate relentlessly. The second meeting involves a fake breast torn open during rehearsal. The third is a disastrous dinner in which the dancer accuses Sapin of knowing about her childhood abuse and doing nothing. The fourth finds her at his door soaked in blood. The fifth and sixth dissolve into sensory deprivation: hooded, bound on all fours, fed pureed food through tubes, cleaned by automated jets, slowly reduced to animal state. Koch writes captivity with a poet’s sense of rhythm and a clinician’s patience. The professor’s perverse gratitude amid degradation feels earned rather than contrived. The story refuses easy moralizing. It simply observes the process until the man becomes the horse of the title, rocking gently under an invisible rider who sings a half-remembered lullaby.
The anthology closes with two shorter pieces that function as sharp codas. Justin Lutz’s “Not Waving, but Drowning” literalizes Stevie Smith’s poem inside a flooded basement venue, turning a gig into slow, collective submersion. Brendan Vidito’s “Theatre of Sublimation,” meanwhile, presents a performance in which the audience itself becomes the raw material. Both deny the reader any clean exit.
Certain obsessions repeat across the collection. Clean spaces—operating theaters, copy shops, white-painted Butoh skin—reveal themselves as sites of deepest filth. History loops like scratched film. Privacy is illusory; the body is always subject to sculpture, harvest, projection, or transformation. There is no warmth offered and no redemption promised, only a cold, surgical clarity that refuses to avert its gaze.
Filthy Loot Press has produced a handsome, minimalist object: stark cover art by Rat himself, clean typography, no excess. The physical book feels like the concrete city it describes. In the broader landscape of contemporary extreme horror—where shock often substitutes for substance—New Meat in a Clean Room stands apart. It shares DNA with recent works by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Eric LaRocca, or Hailey Piper, but its intellectual rigor and formal cohesion place it closer to the tradition of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood or Kathe Koja’s early novels. Ira Rat’s editorial hand is confident yet unobtrusive; the stories converse without ever feeling forced.
This is not comfortable reading. It is not intended to be. It is, however, one of the most tightly conceived, skillfully executed, and intellectually demanding horror anthologies I have encountered in recent years. Readers seeking easy scares or traditional resolution should look elsewhere. Those willing to sit with sustained discomfort will find something sharp, lasting, and deeply unsettling.