First published back in November of 2023, British author Harrison Phillips’ novel ‘Father Christmas Vs The Abominable Snowman’ offered up a wild Christmas themed B-Movie-esque horror that’s perfect for the festive season.
DLS Synopsis:
Joe had ambitions of becoming an actor. Or at least, that had once been his hope. However, if he was honest with himself, being the Santa for the Kingfisher Shopping Centre wasn’t exactly what he’d hoped to become. Nevertheless, a job’s a job, and being the mall Santa did have its perks – one such perk being Nicola.
He met Nicola through the job where she was one of the elves who ushered the kids into the grotto, handing out gifts and keeping the Santa experience an efficient money-making process. She was also an insatiable cock sucking nymphomaniac who Joe happened to be both bumping uglies with and falling in love with.
Joe found the two of them had a lot in common. Apart from wanting to rut like a pair of horny teenagers as often as possible, they both also had their own vices to contend with. Joe was an alcoholic. Plain and simple. Whilst Nicola was addicted to prescription strength painkillers. Fancy medication she spent half her meagre wages on.
With Christmas now looming, the shopping centre should’ve been packed with shoppers. The grotto should’ve been heaving, with Santa and the elves rushed off their feet. However, the town was facing the biggest storm it had seen in over a century. A blizzard of relentlessly falling snow keeping all but the most determined seasonal shoppers away.
However, the grotto staff’s shift wasn’t going to be quite the easy-going affair they’d hoped it would be. Although there weren’t quite as many punters queuing for Santa, the mall was going to have another visitor. Eight-foot-tall, covered from head to toe in thick white fur, sporting razor sharp teeth and with talons that could rip a body in half in the blink of an eye – the yeti had broken free from a high-security transportation van whilst it was en route to a military laboratory.
Suddenly, Joe had a hell of a lot more to worry about than when he was going to get his next drink. Whilst the winter weather howled outside, Santa and his helpers had a yeti to contend with. It was going to be one heck of a challenging shift…
DLS Review:
Ho ho ho-ly shit is this a ferociously fearsome festive treat! To be fair, this short novel from Phillips offers up exactly what it says on the tin. A wildly over-the-top extreme horror with a festive Christmas twist to it. It’s almost as if the makers of ‘Die Hard’ (1988) went to the ‘Troma’ team and said “we’re gonna try a change in direction, do your worst”.
The end result is a bigass yeti, with an insatiable hunger for human brains, that’s gotten loose and is now on the rampage, searching for more hapless victims to devour. Ergo, we have bucketloads of blood, guts and brains splattered across many of the pages!
Of course, it doesn’t just launch straight into this carnage. Instead, it’s a gradual decent into this visceral carnage, with the novel starting off with said yeti killing a yak farmer in Nepal, before the military manage to capture the beast and transport it back to good old Blighty, for some tests.
Alas, whilst our ferocious furry friend is being transported to the military labs, the van has a wee accident involving a bus full of school children and the bus’s hungover driver. Oops is an understatement! So, now we have this big old yeti rampaging around the place, before it finally sets its eyes on the Kingfisher Shopping Centre, where Joe and his helpers are working.
What ensues is a wild ride of bloodshed and absolute carnage. Bodies go flying. There’s guts and gore everywhere. Honestly, the sheer mayhem unleashed within the second half of the novel is quite simply splattacular!
But that’s not the only wild pulpy thrill within the novel. Phillips also throws in a whole tonne of explicit and rampant sex, to titillate the tastebuds of even the most decerning of pulply connoisseurs.
A lot of this hot-blooded sex comes from the middle-aged nympho, Nicola. Oh yes, this girl is naughty, and she just can’t seem to get enough of Joe’s manhood. As such, her hands and mouth are constantly inside Santa’s big red trousers. Of course, Joe loves it. The end result is regular bouts of sex punctuating the frenzied frolicking of our yeti, before the big shopping centre showdown brings it all to a blood drenched head.
All through this, Phillips shows absolutely no mercy for any of his characters. They’re really all just fodder for his maniacal meat-grinder. Carefully crafted human props to wander blindly into mayhem, where they come to some gruesome end, thanks to our marauding furry friend.
Honestly, the way Phillips kills off each and every one of his characters, with seemingly reckless abandonment, is probably one of the most entertaining aspects to the book. Literally no one is safe from this author’s despicable plans for bloody carnage. They’re all meat for the beast. Each and every one of ‘em…bar fucking none!
So yeah, unashamedly lowbrow pulp horror with a ferociously festive twist to it. Trust me, if an absolute abundance of sex and blood splattered violence is your jam, especially during the run up to Christmas, then for a relatively quick read, this one’s absolutely got you covered.
The novel runs for a total of 104 pages.
© DLS Reviews
