Title: Family Til’ It Can’t Be, Gang Til’ It Ain’t

Author: Chaz Williams

Release date: January 5th, 2024

Huge thanks to Chaz for sending me a digital ARC of this one. I had it preordered some time ago, and was trying my best to get it read before release date, but life got hectic!

I connected with Chaz a bit ago on IG, as he’s an avid reader and supporter of a lot of Indie Horror. He was with Uncomfortably Dark for a bit reviewing there as well, which is always a great thing to see, as Candace Nola does a ton of work promoting a ton of authors, so having Chaz also providing reviews there was a awesome.

With ‘Family Til’ It Can’t Be, Gang Til’ It Ain’t,’ Chaz has taken the step from having some short stories published in anthologies, to having a tried and true singular release and that’s always a wonderful moment for any author.

I went into this pretty blind, wanting to see what Chaz created for his debut and, I can safely say, for those looking for an exciting new voice in extreme horror, Chaz should be on your radar.

What I liked: The novella follows a group of friends who will always have each other’s backs no matter what. That is until a seemingly unrelated discovery of a ‘kill room’ in a warehouse reveals certain things.

Williams opens this one up with an excellent ‘prologue,’ setting the stage for the brutality that follows. We get some lush, vicious descriptions of what these teens find in the warehouse and it is clearly Chaz’s war-horn sounding that he’s entering the extreme horror game and he’s coming all guns-blazing.

From there, the friends get together and we learn that the one guy – the lawyer in the group – is actually behind all the killings. He reveals that something inside of him makes him do these killings and that, while the acts are heinous, he begs and pleads that he himself is not a monster.

Williams walks that tightrope of ‘how far would you go to help a friend’ well. We get back stories of other instances where the friends have come to help each other and we see how this bond that they’ve created is ‘thicker than blood.’

I do want to add that this novella reads as though it was covered in grime. I don’t know how to describe it well, and a part of that is I’m a 42-year-old, white guy. But this feels like it came from the streets. It has its pulse firmly in the underground and the ‘bad side of the tracks’ if you will and that elevates this story from simply an extreme story with gore to a story with emotions and attachments to characters. This group came from hard times and have stuck beside each other through the hard times.

Which makes the ending that much more emotional and one that – I’m staying spoiler free here – will either work really well for the reader or not.

What I didn’t like: For this being his debut, Chaz was all over it in terms of creating tension, keeping the pace breakneck fast and making me want to believe in the characters.

A few things stuck out for me though, and I want to approach them constructively.

The first was the very common trope of ‘only killing bad people.’ That has been done a million times before (but hey, so has monsters in the woods!), so it was great to see Chaz add his own twist to it, but I wished he’d not mentioned anything about ‘Dexter’ at all, as it will make some folks tune out immediately.

The second thing – and this is my own personal thing (and we’ve all been guilty of it) – is the book and name dropping that really does reduce the ability to suspend disbelief. I get why we want to do it and why we all do it, but as a reader, it does drive me bonkers lol.

Which brings me to the third thing. It’s mentioned early on that part of the reason our killer begins to think about what brings him joy, is his discovery of reading extreme horror and Splatterpunk. Any time ANY correlation between someone deciding to kill someone based on reading something, or even listening to heavy metal music, makes me roll my eyes. There really is no correlation that people who read horror are more prone to violence, horrid acts or killing people. We need to actively move away from that, especially as we grapple with so many unhinged people in the world right now.

And lastly – the ending was telegraphed pretty blatantly. I’m ok when it works as a distractive piece (Hell, I get shit on for my purposeful early revealing the ‘who’ in one of my own novels), but I think it would’ve been far more subtle to have eliminated the other group text moment and left us thinking the police would be more involved.

Why you should buy this: Overall, this was a really enjoyable novella that is an easy one-sit reading. Chaz’s debut definitely shows that he’s here to deliver the dark goods and that he’ll be doing that with a unique and distinctive storytelling voice. I’m really excited to see where he goes from here and I think this one is going to be a sleeper hit in 2024 with many, many people finding it and it ending up on a number of year end ‘Best-Of’ lists.

Well done on this debut and now we await the next release!

3/5