Izzy Von's New Novel, 'The Jetty', Offers Horror Fans Gory Thrill Ride

Transformation. In many ways it’s the theme common to all horror tales. Through film and the printed page, the human body—nude, dead, mutilated or deformed—has evolved into the oft-fetishized narrative centerpiece, whether it be a lycanthrope’s bestial metamorphosis, Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde, or the putrefying decay of a zombie. With a lineage extending back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’, straight through to Clive Barker’s body-modifying Cenobites and the films of Japanese writer/director Shinya Tsukamoto and Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, horror embraces physical change like no other genre.

Those varying facets of change, destruction, and rebirth are explored in indie author Izzy Von’s exciting and violent new horror-thriller The Jetty. Alternately titled Don’t Fuck With A Transwoman From Texas With A Gun, the novel is a wild sensory assault that hits the ground running and doesn’t stop until the last sentence.

While planning a vacation to the Texas Gulf Coast, transgender woman Jerri can’t believe her good fortune in cheaply renting a seaside bungalow. Encouraged by her therapist and eager for a retreat to deal with the emotional fallout of a shattered marriage and lingering childhood trauma inflicted by her bigoted, abusive father, Jerri’s holiday quickly goes downhill after she’s hassled by the town’s small-minded residents at a local bar. Unbeknownst to her, however, those same townies are members of a demon-worshiping cult and the jetty attached to her bungalow is a multidimensional doorway due to open during a rare celestial alignment. Chosen specifically by the cult’s hateful and charismatic leader, Leon, Jerri is first forced to confront the manifestation of her greatest fears before she’s captured and tortured on the demon’s black stone altar. This time, however, the cult may have bitten off more than they bargained for: unwilling to submit to Leon’s directive to join their ranks and bequeathed with astonishing healing abilities due to a shard of altar stone inadvertently becoming lodged in her ankle, Jerri breaks free and sets out for retribution. Armed only with a knife, her trusty .357 Magnum and a handful of bullets, she learns the secrets of her demonic captor and traverses space/time to bring the fight to her enemies. But how much bodily damage can one person endure? And can Jerri find her way out of the jetty’s otherworldly subterranean labyrinth before she’s killed or, worse, trapped for eternity?

Unlike Von’s debut novel, the humorous zombie apocalypse road trip romp A Dandy Among The Dead, The Jetty is a far darker work, more explicitly personal and intense. Shades of Lovecraft lurk in the cosmic backdrop, but at its heart the story is one person’s battle against ignorance and repression. As the main character, Jerri is a combination of fragility, vulnerability, and time-hardened strength; the paternal mistreatment of her youth and intolerance experienced in adulthood led her to a self-destructive low, but the woman we see at the novel’s onset is no mere victim. Having escaped the deep-immersion nightmare the demon Noxitus fashions out of her own memories, Jerri’s journey is a token of personal empowerment, and her will to overcome the cult’s machinations, even at utmost personal cost, underscores that survivor’s message.

The Jetty may tread its fair share of heavy topics, but never forgets to entertain, either. Horror aficionados impatient with slow burn set-ups will delight in the novel’s abundance of splattery set pieces. Bodies are rigorously and vividly battered, shot, stabbed, dissected, dismembered, disemboweled, beheaded and otherwise pulverized in a myriad of inventive and shocking ways. While some may assert Von’s detailed use of violence is simply exploitative torture porn, it provides a welcomed catharsis, giving solid shape to Jerri’s traumas. One of the novel’s most spirited ideas is the restorative nature of the altar stone; both Jerri and Leon are imbued with its powers, and each undergo extremes of suffering in their war for supremacy. It’s a heady notion that provokes some of the most vicious imagery in recent horror memory, yet also serves to elevate what could’ve been a standard blood-soaked revenge yarn. The regeneration allows Jerri to be literally and figuratively reborn, to defiantly shed her previous identity and become who she was destined to be.

While not for the faint of heart, with its sympathetic lead, breathless pace, furious energy and redeeming violence, The Jetty is a gory thrill ride no true horror fan will want to miss, and for those reasons I give it a resounding 4.5 (out of 5) on my Fang Scale. This would make for one hell of a movie.