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Table of Contents

The Fruits of Malice

Introduction
My First Taste of Triana
Back to Black (or Blonde and Brunette?)
Femme Fatale, All-American Girl
Cheerleaders Never Say Die! (…or “bae”)
Cruel Desire and Grinding Pain
Final Thoughts
Soundtrack
Footnotes
Comments

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The Fruits of Malice

✘ 12-14-25 ✘ 14 min read ✘ 2,632 words ✘

My thoughts on Full Brutal by Kristopher Triana.

Introduction

♪ Oblivion by Grimes ♪

I never walk about, after dark
It's my point of view
'Cause someone could break your neck
Coming up behind you, always coming
And you'd never have a clue

I never look behind, all the time
I will wait forever, always looking straight
Thinking, counting, all the hours you wait

See you on a dark night

I stayed there, savoring the very instant when grief slammed down […] like a hurricane, enjoying the fruits of my malice. It was a bountiful harvest.

I just finished Full Brutal by Kristopher Triana.

Literally. At the time of writing this sentence, it’s been about half an hour since I put the book down.¹

This wasn’t my first foray into extreme horror. A couple years ago my partner, Jem, lent me a physical copy of Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, and after months of begging me to read it I finally opened it up.

I expected to step into a toxic homoerotic love story—something more akin to A Separate Peace than American Psycho. Although I’d been told the book dealt with dark themes, I underestimated the scope of its murder, gore, and other miscellaneous depravities. The ending stayed with me for weeks.

Needless to say I was hooked. I immediately pressed my husband for more recommendations and scoured r/ExtremeHorrorLit.

I’ve read a handful of other extreme horror books since. The genre spans from relatively “light” material focused on run-of-the-mill sex pests, serial killers, and supernatural spooks; to grandiose illustrations of the macabre, dark in tone and purple in prose; to indulgently schlocky murder-porn fests aptly categorized as “splatterpunk”.

To the best of my ability, here’s what I’ve read so far in chronological order:

Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite
Woom by Duncan Ralston
The President’s Son by Jon Athan
Gone to See the River Man by Kristopher Triana
Fluids by May Leitz
Girl Flesh by May Leitz
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski ²
Full Brutal by Kristopher Triana

These books aren’t for the faint of heart. Don’t say I didn’t warn you if you decide to pick any of them up.

Note:

Some of the quotations embedded in this post have been edited so as to avoid spoilers
Spoilers are marked like this; hover to show text.

My First Taste of Triana

♪ Killing Spree by Death ♪

To the world around he was the perfect person
Planning for an alibi he then starts rehearsing
A human bomb just waiting to explode
This secret rage can't be controlled

Slaughtered the dreams of others
One left to recover
Self-inflicted wounds
Life he has consumed

Horror would make a home on his shoulder and whisper in his ears so he could think of nothing but his impending doom.

As you can see above, my first taste of Triana’s work was Gone to See the River Man.

I read it on the heels of Woom by Duncan Ralston and The President’s Son by Jon Athan. Both were more splatterpunk-y than Exquisite Corpse, especially The President’s Son, which had devolved into an endlessly-torturous gore fest midway through.

Anxious for something with a slower burn, I picked up GTSTRM (as it is often shortened online). I’d heard of Triana’s name before, as well as this book in particular. I knew it was good, but nothing else beyond that. Jumping in blind is probably the best way to read it.

I’ll save my full thoughts for its own medialog entry, but suffice to say I was totally engrossed. I think I finished the book within three or four days. I would come home from work, get changed, and sit down and read for hours. I can’t remember the last time a book has made me feel like that. Not even Exquisite Corpse magnetized so much of my attention.³

Back to Black (or Blonde and Brunette?)

♪ Carmen by Lana Del Rey ♪

The boys, the girls
They all like Carmen
She gives them butterflies
Bats her cartoon eyes
She laughs like God
Her mind's like a diamond
Audiotune lies
She's still shining
Like lightning, whoa, whoa
White lightning

I had delivered this tragedy, and had underlined it with ghastly brutality.

I read both of May Leitz’s⁴ books after GTSTRM (I preferred Girl Flesh over Fluids, though my husband thinks the opposite), then took a “break” from extreme horror with House of Leaves (which wasn’t so much of a break as a schizophrenic detour).

House of Leaves absolutely bowled me over. It might have joined my list of favorite books ever, honestly. I’ll definitely reread it in the future at least, whereupon I’ll make a blog post about it, too.

But man, it was heavy. And esoteric. And difficult. Which was the point. But after all that I just wanted to have some fun, you know?

Here enters Full Brutal. It seemed to promise the splatterpunk-y gore and guts I wanted from an author I trusted to deliver.

The book follows a high school cheerleader named Kim White. She has a perfect life—good looks, good grades, a hot boyfriend, a rich father—that is totally devoid of meaning. Driven to nihilistic apathy, she embarks on a campaign of chaos and cruelty that eventually envelops her entire town.

I can safely say that it scratched the itch.

Femme Fatale, All-American Girl

♪ Just A Girl by No Doubt ♪

'Cause I'm just a girl, I'd rather not be
'Cause they won't let me drive late at night
Oh, I'm just a girl, guess I'm some kind of freak
'Cause they all sit and stare with their eyes
Oh, I'm just a girl, take a good look at me
Just your typical prototype

Oh, I've had it up to here
Oh, am I making myself clear?

Passive aggression was a sport I often played, a delightful pastime just like manipulation, sarcasm and suggestion. My friends were not exempt from these games, though they didn’t know I was playing. If anything, they got the heaviest assaults of all.

After a couple short introductory chapters, Kim hits the ground running and enacts her master plan, which leads to another plan, and so forth.

Her methods mostly involve sexual coercion, rape, blackmail, and increasingly gruesome violence. Cunning and calculating, she weaponizes her sexuality, but is far from a traditional femme fatale.

Triana makes sure to highlight how young she is at several key junctions in the story. Whilst some readers found this distasteful, I think it served to better establish her character. Speaking to society’s bifurcated appraisal of women, Kim straddles the line between two personas: the smart, seductive she-devil and the sexually curious, gullible teenager. She is sadistic, violent, and manipulative as much as she is naive, short-sighted, and petty.

Presented as an evil mastermind, she is also carried by her good looks and good luck, which in my opinion is part of the fun in having a highschool cheerleader as an antagonist: no one bothers to look behind the mask of an all-American sixteen year old during a murder investigation.

In the end, it’s hard to tell whether Kim is outsmarting everyone or merely banking on her reputation as a straight-A Samaritan. This question looms over the entire story, especially in the second half as her antics become increasingly bold and unbelievable. Falling deeper into her dark impulses, she continues escaping suspicion where you’d expect anyone less pretty, young, and female to be called into question; I suppose that whether this dynamic is entertaining or infuriating depends on how you prescribe to the book’s overall premise.

Cheerleaders Never Say Die! (…or “bae”)

♪ Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus ♪

'Cause I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby
Yeah, I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby
Listen to Iron Maiden, baby, with me, ooh

Oh, yeah, dirtbag
No, she doesn't know what she's missin'
Oh, yeah, dirtbag
No, she doesn't know what she's missin'

Man, I feel like mold
It's prom night and I am lonely
Lo and behold
She's walkin' over to me
This must be fake
My lip starts to shake
How does she know who I am?

Even the thought of teenage rebellion made me want to wretch, as it too was an exhausted cliché.

As fun as this archetype is, I felt it could’ve been utilized more effectively. It’s painfully obvious that Triana’s understanding of teenagers, high school, and adolescent psychology is stuck in the 1980s.

I graduated high school in 2016. Even during the early 2010s, the classic dichotomies of popular kids versus losers, jocks versus nerds, and posers versus nonconformists were largely irrelevant. But these outdated concepts form the thesis of Kim’s many internal rants, which sound as if they could’ve been lifted straight from Carrie or Heathers.

To offset this stark oversight, modern slang terms are constantly shoehorned into the dialogue. But rather than aiding in immersion, they yanked me out of the story every time they appeared.

I highlighted several examples, such as:

“What’s your bae Ashton been up to?”

“You are on point!”

“Jeez, you have no chill […]”

“It’s straight fire.”

“I mean, you know they’re all salty over Derek.” ⁵

“Whud up, fam?”

…and that’s just a handful of examples, lol.

The most egregious was this oblique reference to The Goonies, which hasn’t been culturally relevant among young adults for at least twenty years:

Cheerleaders never say die!

The text is littered with other strange faux paus, like magazines casually littered around homes or in the hands of teenage girls (I mean, who reads magazines these days?⁶), and the use of domestic landline telephones (I suspect that my generation was the last to still actively use them growing up).

Parts of the story hinge on social media, cyberbullying, internet pornography, live streaming, etc, but these instances felt forced to me—like cheap accelerations of violence and cruelty, or superficial injections of surface-level critiques on modern society. At a certain point I wondered if it would’ve been better to just rewind and have it take place in the 1980s or 1990s.

To be fair, Full Brutal was Triana’s first published book, which I didn’t know until after I finished reading it. GTSTRM is a case study in well-crafted storytelling, so I was surprised that segments of Full Brutal’s plot felt lackluster by comparison.

But I can forgive a freshman enterprise, and aside from these weird blips, the overarching teenagedom colors the story with shades of satire that are strikingly Palahniuk-esque—both lightening the story beats with well-timed comedy, and darkening its content within the context of youth.

Cruel Desire and Grinding Pain

♪ Closer by Nine Inch Nails ♪

You let me violate you
You let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you
You let me complicate you

(Help me)
I broke apart my insides
(Help me)
I've got no soul to sell
(Help me)
The only thing that works for me
Help me get away from myself

I had entered a fuchsia zone where all I could feel was cruel desire and […] grinding pain…

The main crux of what makes Full Brutal work is the nature of violence as disseminated by a psychopathic sixteen year old girl. Kim acts as a harbinger of death and destruction, weaponizing the spheres of influence young women are trapped into from a young age: sex, attraction, romance, family, patriarchy, etc. Victimized to violence herself, Kim is never a victim, twisting the notion inside out until she can externalize the concept onto others.

Sex is pleasurable only inasmuch as it extracts pain from her partners. Male characters—grown men and teenage boys alike—are simultaneously victims and abusers, highlighting the inconsistencies found within the seat of patriarchy itself. Most female characters act as a mirror to Kim’s own weaknesses; she savors in destroying them, only appreciating the tender beauty of womanhood as it is ruined.

The book itself is very sex heavy. It begins with Kim’s best friend, Amy, recounting how she lost her virginity. The story is unremarkable, but Amy embellishes it with an air of mystery that sends the virginal Kim down a path of cruel desire.

Up until this point Kim has been mostly apathetic to sex, even going so far as to blithely label herself asexual. She views sex as a boring obligation at best or a tool of control at worst. Oddly innocent in her lack of personal experience, she remarks that:

[…] Girls were willing, but they didn’t seem to be having sex so much as they were having sex done to them.

It’s only until she discovers violence and degradation that she develops a sexual appetite. For Kim, sex becomes a vehicle for cruelty. At first she uses it to abuse her victims herself, but as the story progresses she also begins to meddle with other people’s relationships, orchestrating infidelity, rapes, and secret revenge porn from a distance.

The book takes a pornographic approach to unfold its violence. The pacing is tantalizing slow to start, building up and up until it explodes in dramatic climax—before cutting to black, whereupon the process starts over again as Kim searches for more extreme solutions to her endless hunger for cruelty.

To be honest I couldn’t help rooting for Kim, even as she destroyed the lives of everyone around her. There’s something admirable about her drive and ambition and careless disregard for society. Imagine following through with every intrusive thought that pops into your brain; it’d require a certain level of courage—or insanity. Perhaps that’s why those of us sympathetic to horror are drawn to such villains and their limitless capacities for violence: they represent an ultimate potential for action.

There is one final piece that completes Full Brutal’s thematic tapestry. It acts as the seed of the story’s underlying darkness, tying all of its disparate concepts together in a gruesome irony that progresses in tandem with the erosion of Kim’s mental state. I won’t mention it here, as it’s better experienced while reading.

Final Thoughts

♪ Threats of Romance by Marilyn Manson ♪

A girl is a man's sickness
We all know the way it ends
No matter how many times we film it
The audience thinks they've seen it for the first time

Things that are pretty are always kept behind glass
And someone like me, someone like me can't make it last

The world is an amazing place if you can tolerate it.

Full Brutal is a fun ride. Despite suffering from occasionally clunky writing, it provides a lot of depth beneath its splatterpunk pastiche. Threaded with satisfying chains of cause and effect, the real draw lies in its antagonist, Kim White. Extreme horror fans won’t be surprised by its graphic depictions of violence and sexual abuse, though average readers should proceed with caution.

Rating: ★★★★
Where to access: trianahorror.com, Kobo, Anna’s Archive*

*Also found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc; I only provide links to author websites, Kobo, and Anna’s Archive.

Soundtrack

Oblivion by Grimes
Killing Spree by Death
Carmen by Lana Del Rey
Just A Girl by No Doubt
Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus
Closer by Nine Inch Nails
Threats of Romance by Marilyn Manson

Footnotes

Proverbially; these days I mostly read ebooks. Also, I didn’t finish this post until a couple nights later—it took me about ~5 hours to research, write, and format altogether. ↩
I wouldn’t consider House of Leaves an extreme horror book per se, but it certainly counts as horror, albeit more abstract in execution; often listed with “the most disturbing books ever”, its lack of guts and gore makes it even more impressive alongside splatterpunk titles. ↩
Which isn’t to say Exquisite Corpse isn’t good. I still think it’s the best extreme horror book I’ve ever read. But the prose and plot can be heavy to sift through at times, requiring more focus and endurance. ↩
Me and my husband’s favorite horror YouTuber—her novels are awesome! ↩
Context: this was said in reference to the lead suspect in an active murder investigation. ↩
Disclaimer: I do not condone the death of print media in any way, shape, or form. Read your local newspaper! ↩

#2025 #medialog #readlog