Over the past two months, a certain author has been vilified and canceled by the Horror community for his book. In my opinion, this was for the best.

The crime in question was the use of graphic AI-created images of a little girl being menaced by a large, hairy man in a Santa outfit. The images were pornographic in nature and since AI often creates images based on a real source, they were quite possibly modeled after a real scene of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM for short.

The fact that AI is obscene and unforgivably corrupt notwithstanding, the sentence of cancellation stemmed from the fact that it was CSAM imagery in a book, Saint Mick, about a “bad Santa” knockoff who molests small children. What many probably wonder, however, is how far is too far when it comes to child abuse in horror.

Some of the venerable books in Splatterpunk include scenes of child abuse, child rape and child murder.

In fact, one of the best known writers (and my idol) Richard Laymon often included children being put in precarious situations in his books. His first book, The Cellar, contained scenes of a known molester kidnapping and violating a little girl throughout his quest to find his wife and daughter, the same daughter that he was imprisoned for molesting. The scenes are dark, the content unspeakable and the overall atmosphere only helps in making the book depressing.

Another of his books, Island, includes two girls being kept in a cage and being violated by a psychopath. However, one of the oddities of Laymon’s fiction is that girls (and even adult women) don’t show any lasting emotional or physical scars of their violation. They usually shrug it off and move on, so there is a certain amount of suspension of reality in Laymon’s work.

Some books that are heralded as high-class fiction today include scenes of CSAM. Nabakov’s Lolita, the novel about a man essentially marrying a woman to get to her underage daughter and pursuing a toxic love affair with the child, is often considered a great work of fiction and contemporary literature. It contains erotic imagery in text of a twelve-year-old girl being fondled and sexualized by a man pushing fifty.

Another book that receives attention despite being a few hundred years old is 120 Days of Sodom by Donatien Alphonse Francois Marquis de Sade. The Marquis, no stranger to controversy in his private life, wrote 120 Days on a roll of a toilet paper while imprisoned for sex crimes and used his time to pen a pretentious overture into the depths of hedonism that explored graphic scenes of BDSM, pedophilia, coprophagia, urophilia, snuff and rape. Today, the book is a dare to read and banned in many places, but heralded as high fiction due to its obscene nature.

Some books that invoke scenes of pedophilia and were met with intense hatred upon release include works like Hogg by Samuel R. Delany, or Chip to his friends. Delany, a noteworthy science fiction maestro, wrote the novel, Hogg, in his youth and expounded on themes of a dystopian racist nightmare in which a young boy is enslaved by one grown man after another until he winds up in the “care” of a trucker called Hogg. The book, in my opinion, is boring and lacks substance. Hogg was unpublishable in the 60s and only released in the 90s when Delany had met critical acclaim for science fiction. Every page and chapter of Hogg is filled with scenes of overly-detailed sexual encounters between the boy and grown men, or children in general and grown men. A complaint that Delany was a member of NAMbLA is often touted as the reason for why the book was created. I don’t think that’s the case, but that’s a story for another day.

Just last year, the author S.S. Hughes published a book called Deviant Desires, in which a couple with a mutual attraction for children kidnap a pair of kids and proceed to spend the novel assaulting them. The book is labeled as horror, but the scenes are graphic and written in an erotic format. DD went viral on TikTok and was met with intense hatred, scrutiny and disgust.

The one thing they all have in common is that they push the boundary of what is acceptable in society. They push the reader into a state of discomfort. The books invoke triggers of trauma and nightmarish memories. The characters engage in acts that deviate from the norm and what is acceptable.

In my own literary career, I have penned two works that included children being put in a precarious situation, but nothing is shown and the works don’t linger on them. There are many others that do linger, but the point is not to paint an image of the sexualization of children, but rather to display how vile and wicked someone is to do such a thing and hopefully, to meet their comeuppance for such horrific actions.

If your horror story is stuck on the concept of sexualizing a ten-year-old and using descriptive AI or words to overindulge yourself by putting said child in a situation that is discerning and erotic, I suggest you seek psychiatric help immediately.

The horror community responded properly and appropriately with the way they demonized and cast-out the author of the AI-CSAM book, and with good reason. People need to stand up and fight back against AI and fight the abundant use of youthful sexual material in fiction, unless it's to build up a hatred for the villain or to vindicate his horrific punishment at the end of the book.

I only hope more will learn to stand against troubling concepts.

However, in my estimate of humanity, I question how long before Deviant Desires, Hogg or even Saint Mick receive renewed praise for pushing the boundary and become known as high literature.

ABOUT JERRY:

Jerry Blaze is an award-winning author of Horror and Bizarro fiction.

After achieving success in the erotic market, Jerry decided to undertake Extreme Horror/Splatterpunk/Bizarro fiction writing and released several books. Some of his books have been bestsellers on Amazon. He has been awarded the 2025 Golden Wizard Book Prize and the Literary Titan award.

Jerry is a fan of Grindhouse and exploitation films from the 70s and 80s, often modeling his work on them. He currently lives in the American Midwest, but travels often to get inspiration or to run away from angry mobs.