100% Match
“Before going to bed, I send an email to my senator telling him he’ll be assassinated in thirteen days.”
TW/CW: Mention of past suicide, mention of dead animal, mention of gun violence against children, allusion to kidnapping, mention of cruelty to animals, mention of child death, mistreatment of dead body, mention of SA, ingestion of bodily fluids, absurd torture
A bald, overweight fry cook with a depraved mind conducts research in order to find his perfect match
(all mentions of upsetting content will be marked with this color of text)
Book Summary:
We follow Bart, a middle aged fry cook who is looking for love. He begins his day telling us the statistics of what women look for in a man (body type, penis size and occupation) all things that he falls short on. He gets ready for the day brushing his teeth, putting on deodorant and describing to us how he saves the tissues in a ziploc bag when he blows his nose.
Great stuff Bart.
Bart works at Jim’s Burger Joint which is described as “Mangle County’s Best Burger!” over his breakfast we get more of Bart’s internal monologue. He’s very knowledgeable about the statistics of women and what they like about men, every thing he does from his perfectly balanced breakfast to his masturbation sessions is done with precision, in the hopes that he will meet “the one” and he must be ready when he does. He specifically curates his routine, his interests and even his thoughts into morphing himself into the ideal male specimen.
As Bart leaves for work he reveals to us that he does live in a rather nice home, left to him by his mother who drank cyanide laced tea and died. We also learn that he is very serious about his physical health, walking to work each day and doing lunges and shadow boxing on his lunch breaks.
We also learn that he does not like cats, that a few times he has masturbated to his 80 year old neighbor, and that Bart seems to love putting gross things in his ziploc bag because he crushes a cricket under his shoe and puts it in there with the tissue.
When Bart arrives at work we meet his boss Jim who is described as pompous, loud mouthed and vulgar, and Hector a perpetually late Latino toker with tons of tattoos.
The work day starts with Hector taking orders and Bart slinging patties on the grill, though we soon learn that our good friend Bart is not the model citizen we previously thought as he reveals that he ejaculates into the kitchen’s mayo jars, and then cooks his snot tissue into the burger and sprinkles the cricket guts over the side of large fries.
We then learn that this is something he does throughout the day, taking whatever gross things he can find and mixing them into people’s orders.
At noon we meet Lacy a “slutty” girl who smells like diapers and cigarettes. A poor single mother with no baby daddy. But before we can get to know more about her Bart’s shift ends and he goes home to….poop in a bag and save it, admire a dead dog he has in his fridge and….oh watch a documentary. Completely normal.
Oh and then he shoots the kid he has chained up in his basement before going to bed.
Our next chapter opens with Bart telling us about Debra, a blonde department store worker who dreamed of being a doctor that he once went on a date with. Debra checked a lot of the boxes that Bart looked for in a girl, and she had a lot of the indications of someone who would do good in a long term relationship.
They went to Applebees though honestly I would have chosen Chili’s.
The night goes well, and it might have been happily ever after except Debra didn’t laugh at one of Bart’s jokes….And then two days later Debra died because someone had replaced the perfume in her bottle with hydrofloruic acid.
Strange
The next day at work Bart finally finds a purpose for the dead dog as the first customer of the day orders six cheeseburgers! Lacy complains about her baby and after work Bart goes grocery shopping. He notices a couple of women in the store, an elderly Asian and a younger Latina but quickly deduces that neither of them would make a suitable mate. Bart is trying to finish up his grocery shopping when he runs into Mr. Higgins his middle school principal.
They chat for a moment and Bart reveals his dream is to become a teacher before its time for him to check out and leave.
While leaving the parking lot he sees a woman drop her wallet and ever our good samaritan he retrieves it and quickly returns it to the woman who albeit frightened at first is timid and relieved at the kind gesture. Bart gives her a once over and she seems to have a lot of desirable attributes, conservative clothes and appearance, nice hair, well groomed.
But alas Bart is unable to speak and the woman goes inside the store and he defeatedly heads home. He kicks at a cat in his yard before scooping it up, feeds it some milk and tuna, and watches tv.
And then he…oh yes! Hacks up the dead kid in the basement and puts him in freezer bags. Before heading to take a shower.
In the next chapter Bart tells us about another woman. Wendy, whom he met online, who had dark hair and clothes and considered herself a poet who once again checked many of Bart’s boxes. They seemed to really hit it off, texting constantly every single day, Bart trying to make sense of her poems. Eventually he convinced her to meet in person, and they did at a local seafood restaurant. It doesn’t take Bart long to realize however that he has been catfished, Wendy is older than advertised. But they both try to make good of the situation and sit and talk and eat.
Wendy then reveals that she has 5 children.
Bart immediately leaves
And then later that night Wendy, all 5 of her children, and three apartment residents die in a fire.
The next day Bart must order an Uber to work because it is raining. Once at work Bart gets vats of chili ready for a chili dog sale, adding of course a few pieces of his own feces into the mixture. What you didn’t think he just pooped in bags for fun did you?
We then learn he also has cat meat on him. And here I thought he might keep Whiskers as a pet.
Throughout the day Hector brags about his sexual escapades and Bart keeps the chili full of his…well yknow. We then learn about another employee, Rico who only works weekends.
And everyone save for Bart has a bowl of chili. Oh wait never mind he actually does eat some.
During the last few minutes of his shift Bart is flabbergasted when Hector tells him that the woman whose wallet he returned the other night is in the store asking for him. The woman thanks him again and introduces herself as Sara and Bart, oh what a little cutie he’s so shy and surprised and bashful he can barely speak!
Once Bart is able to spit out his own name she asks him for a coffee date. They agree to meet the next day ten am at a local place.
And our dear Bart is just on cloud nine, he practically dances home and rifles through his closet trying to decide what to wear. Eventually Bart is able to pick out his outfit, and then he unwinds by watching another documentary and, oh I’ve never tried this hack, drinking his own piss!
And then just before drifting off to sleep he then sends a death threat email to his senator and puts a finger in his butt. Maybe an insomnia cure to try?
The next morning is the big day! Bart is extra careful when he shaves, making sure he’s well groomed and smells amazing. He watches some surgery videos while he gets ready and spiffy. This time however Bart decides to drive, he doesn’t usually because he got his license revoked some time ago, but his mothers old Buick starts right up and he’s off!
Bart is pleased that Sara is also dressed nicely but casually as they wait to order Bart graces us the reader with the wonderful little tidbit that the girl behind the counter is the same girl whose dog he murdered last year by chopping all of its legs off.
Not to be confused however with the dog that Bart had in his fridge a few days ago.
Sara and Bart order and share some small talk about the weather, Sara’s garden, art and each others outfits and then Bart shares about his current career and his teaching goals. Sara then shares that she herself is a kind of teacher, one who makes instructional videos that she promises to elaborate on later.
We then learn that Bart most likely killed almost all of his family over the years when Sara asks about any relatives. Sara too is single with no family nearby though thankfully not murdered.
They share their hobbies with each other, and towards the end of their date Sara asks for Bart’s phone number and before Bart can even wonder if he should be asking her for a second date already Sara invites him to come to her place the following day to watch a movie.
Bart is thrilled.
Bart is not thrilled when he gets pulled over at the start of the next chapter. Bart is more displeased that it is a blonde woman as she asks for his license and registration. She looks over the documents and informs him that his passenger’s brake light is out.
Bart’s relief turns to panic as she starts heading to her car to run his license.
But Bart ever the clever man asks the officer if she can help him inspect the light, by opening the trunk and shining her flashlight inside. And as she’s bent over inside of it Bart smashes her over the head with a crowbar and dumps her unconscious body inside and leaves.
Halfway home the officer comes to and begins to shoot through the trunk into the car, but Bart with a gun of his own fires back killing the woman.
That night Bart celebrates his second date with Sara by bathing in his own feces and violating the officers deceased body with her night stick while he watches tv.
Our next chapter begins at Sara’s house! Sara lives cleanly, and comfortably. As Sara brews tea she asks Bart about his night and they talk about Sara’s garden, music and Sara’s family while they sip their warm tea.
But its only minutes later that Bart begins to feel extremely tired and groggy, yawning and slurring his words before he thinks about the cruel irony that his drink had been drugged before passing out.
Bart wakes up naked and strapped to a table with Sara wearing a black dominatrix latex suit. With Sara telling him he’s going to be a part of her newest lesson, pointing to a camera recording in the corner. Bart notices another camera along with a row of torture devices, whips and saws and chains etc.
Bart is confused on whether this is a sex thing or not as Sara whips him, calls him naughty, whispers in his ear that he is actually her good boy and then puts a funnel in his mouth so he can swallow her puke.
And it doesn’t get much better from there.
Sara smashes his balls with a hammer, saws off his toes, pokes his eyes with needles, all of which are requests from patrons paying to see these things done to him. She pulls out his teeth, puts screws in his nose and….and..
And cuts off his penis….sticks it up his own butt…then shoves a dildo in there….to shove everything in really far.
Actually a lot of things get shoved in Bart’s butt.
And then she pulls out knives and starts exploring his insides.
As Bart dies he dwells on how a very small percentage of women make snuff films and what a shame it was that one of those women happened to be, his 100% match.
Personal Thoughts
I did not like this book. If you could even call it a book, ninety pages. A short story if anything. Splatterpunk itself is a genre that relies on grotesque violence, obscene acts and just shock value writing in general. That’s not the problem, I think the story itself could do with it being longer? It read like an edgy teen in creative writing class trying to come up with the most digusting things he could put within his maximum number of allowed pages.
It started off well and quite descriptive I did like the character quirk of Bart constantly ticking of statistics about men and women and dating in his head throughout everything he does in life and I like how it seemed things were going to be more fleshed out with little snippets in the beginning pages that Bart (full name Bartholemew Bartley) which I also liked is not a good person.
But then it delved into just things because gross for the sake of being gross and it came across as the author trying to one up every act in every chapter and just piling on to the fact that Bart is gross and violent. It would have been fine if Bart was a guy looking for love who also was kind of gross and fed people dead bugs and was awkward around women and killed them when their dates didn’t go right and maybe was enough of a sadist to kick a cat or watch gross videos but it was like
“Oh yeah he uh he jacks off at work into the food! And…oh yeah and he feeds people poop, and he has poop baths! And drinks his pee! And he killed his whole family mwahahaha and he watches gore because he’s so edgy.”
I like splatterpunk as a genre and maybe its because this book was so short but yeah it’s like it was written by some “misunderstood” middle schooler because the gross acts themselves could have been part of the larger story but it was just too damn short for anything to happen. Like why did he have a kid in his basement, peeking into the lives of his co-workers or just more about his job in general, his family was kind of skimmed over at the end which was disappointing.
I know that again splatterpunk isn’t really usually about the story but if you want me to like something that I’ve read I need to feel engaged with it, I didn’t know going in that it was going to be so short so I was excited waiting for the build up of him telling us about past dates and setting the scene at his job and now with a new woman Sara and then it just…ended.
And speaking of Sara, her character alone is why this book needed to be longer. I kind of saw her twist coming from a mile away when she invited him to her house immediately after meeting him. When she mentions her instructional videos my first thought was that she like Bart is a sadistic psychopath and Bart would accidentally find out but he’d love it and happily ever after etc. When he’s at Sara’s house and she asks what he did last night I kind of was like “oh maybe the cop was a family member? Maybe she saw something? Maybe she’s known all this time and has been tracking him?”
And then he wakes up in her snuff dungeon which like okay yes I loved that Bart got tortured and died but thats it? A page and a half description of her torturing him if you could even call it that because its just more mindless edgy slop.
“Hehe she cut his toes off….oh and uh stabbed his eyes….yeah yeah and then she cuts his dick off! Oh and then puts it in his butt…with a dildo!” Like i genuinely was laughing my ass off at the absurdity of it. Which I guess is another good thing I can say, the book made me laugh.
But the writing genuinely didn’t really let me enjoy it, Bart describes the acts he does not with any description but just in simplistics. “I led her to the trunk and then I hit her over the head and then I drove away and then I shot her and then I got home and had a poop bath” which just left me to skim through his lines, the chapter would be normal and then would have some random “I shot a kid, I drink pee” line thrown in at the end that just completely threw me into hysterics, and if the authors goal was to just write a ridiculous book then hey 5/5 stars it was!
But many reviews I read before reading this book were heavy on the “this is disgusting, it made me never want to eat fast food again, this book is disturbing” and maybe it WOULD have been those things if the writing was just overall better in every way.
Rating: 3/10
Would I Reccomend this to someone: If you’re looking for a short one sitting read that will make you laugh and say “what the fuck” a few times then yeah you’ll love it! The acts themselves are described so casually and usually in just a one off sentence that I don’t think even if you are triggered by whats in the tags above you’d be uncomfortable. But if you’re looking for a genuinely good extreme horror book please look elsewhere.
(Free PDF for 100% Match can be found on OceanofPDF.com)
