Killer Tease (2009)

Review by: Alan Kelly
Author: Danny Hogan

It’s hardly a surprise that Miramax looked at the buying options for Danny Hogan’s brazen novella Killer Tease. At a mere 23,000 words, this little book would make the perfect template for a film. A compact little book which is guaranteed to never let your attention waver.

Killer Tease has as its center-piece Eloise Murphy. She isn’t pleasant, she is a down and dirty dangerous woman whose been pissed off once to often. This slim little book should be handed out as a how-to-crush-a-potential-rapists-nuts-manual to every naive 16 year old girl (and boy!) – Eloise is a burlesque star at a sleazy seaside resort until a punter chances his arm and near loses it. Shortly thereafter Eloise is exiting stage left, blackmailed into working for a ferrety pimp who happens to have in his possession some unsavory pictures from her past, she inexorably drawn into a trafficking racket.

Eloise is soon caked in blood, emasculating rapists with stilettos, scalping, stomping and showing some former work mates old-school with an axe. And Killer Tease is Old School all the way to the bloody climax. Channeling the Rockabilly style of Richard Allen and tight linear plots of the 50s and 60s pulps and presenting it to a new generation of readers. Part Grindhouse, part exploitation, part rape revenge –

What makes Eloise so interesting is her complete, yet plausible single-mindedness; the only other thing she cares about besides herself is her cat – and you really don’t want to know what happens to that poor kitty. She is painstakingly aware there are victims all around her and even though she knows she could, she doesn’t help them. She takes down everyone who has wronged her in sometimes hilariously OTT sequences of extreme and inventive ultra-violence and to Hell with everybody else. She begins as a hardened bitch and in the end she is still a hardened bitch – There is no neat and tidy learning curves here and the story is all the better for it!

I hope Hogan returns to this character, she is as captivating as she is repellent but she is not without her flaws. Okay, so she is not essentially a "good person" but who gives a hot fuck about that anyway, right - what makes her entirely believable is how easily violence comes to her and how she needs to use that sort of hatred to claw, kick and hack her way to the bitter end.

With a fast-paced narrative, very clever dialogue and an imperfectly realized brute femme, Eloise is a Russ Meyer-esque psycho vixen roaming through a hellish world that is alive with sleaze, violence, betrayal and murder.