The people Andrew Vachss writes about are hard people, people scarred by society, damaged by relationships with evil, people who people have fucked-over. Vachss spends his waking hours (and who knows, maybe the sleeping one too) in the grip of the worst cases of abuse and cruelty imaginable. He writes his books for the money to carry on the fight. He writes out of necessity. He writes usually novels, in particular the "Burke" series about a shadowy, violent, rigorously moral righter of wrongs (not a vigilante, make that clear). But he also writes short stories and plays and they are what Born Bad is all about.

Vachss has been heavily involved in two comics: the Dark Horse title Hard Looks, dramatising his stories, and the more surreal, Vachss-inspired Underground. Both have featured original pieces by the man, and they feature in here. These fit, as the author says in his introduction, into many categories from hardboiled to horror, but what horrors there are are real horrors: children kidnapped and abused and killed; victims of abuse living out wounded, emotionally broken lived; families of the abused and their abusers living out a never-ending cycle of cruelty and degradation. Some of them feature people - like the mercenary Cross - who will exact brutal revenges. Sometimes the abused fight for themselves. Sometimes they can't.

There is a palpable sense of evil that comes dripping off these pages. Vachss isn't playing; he'd been down about as low as it goes and he's sending back bulletins. The results are like his novels with the approachable, the bearable stuff cut out. Many of these stories are short to the point of brevity, reading strings of them is akin to flicking through scenes of crime photographs: a stalker prowls a high-rise; kids to whom acceptance means killing in a drive-by; a family whose brothers watch helplessly as their father abuses and kills their sisters. There's page after page of this stuff.

It's harder to recommend this book than anything else by the man. This is not a good place to start if you are new to the subterranean nightmare he inhabits; go to the novels for that. This is a political book because it's a book about real people. This an angry book. This is undiluted evil in a straight glass.

He ends the introduction: "Writing isn't my work, it's an organic extension of that work. I may not be a good writer, but I write for a good reason. And if that reason isn't apparent by the time you've finished this collection, I didn't get the job done."