The Coliseum is a horror novel published in 2011 by Craig Davidson, under the pen-name "Patrick Lestewka", a shameful pseudonym reserved for his most twisted works.
The Coliseum contains examples of the following tropes:
- A Deadly Affair: Albert's crime; killing the man who cuckolded him.
- Artistic License – Biology: Lazarus is intersex and capable of impregnating himself. This is treated as a rare but possible thing by his personal doctor. However, in the real-world, there has never been a recorded instance of self-fertilization in hermaphroditic humans since ovaries and testes cannot function simultaneously.
- Black-and-Gray Morality: Between death row inmates and their sadistic gaolers, there are no remotely good people in this story. But Harlan and Albert are the most sympathetic.
- Body Horror: The Coliseum has this in spades. The malnourished inmates are skin-and-bones, filth-caked albinos with translucent skin and black gums, while their victims are strung up with barbed wire and eaten alive down to the bone.
- And then, of course, there's Lazarus's mutant children, who range from skinless simians with snail-like stalk eyes to morbidly obese grubs.
- Cannibal Tribe: The Coliseum's inmate populace is split between two prison gangs; the Skineaters and the Baboon Boys. Both act and look like post-apocalyptic cannibal tribes.
- Creepy Basement: As horrible as the Coliseum's topside is, its basement is the worst place on earth and not even the top dogs dare go down in it, because it's a festering hive of maneating mutants.
- Creepy Crossdresser: Charlie, a Drag Queen serial killer.
- Crusty Caretaker: Freddie, Harlan's school groundskeeper and a child molester.
- Downer Ending: Jackson, the Skineaters, and the Baboon Boys are all killed in a prison riot. Harlan and Albert are both devoured by Lazarus's children. And the guards are about to investigate the basement, dooming themselves to a similar fate.
- The Dreaded: Edward, Jeremy, and Harlan are currently the top dogs of the Coliseum, but that's only because they're filling the power-vaccum that Lazarus left behind.
- Eaten Alive: There's two fates in the Coliseum; this or starvation.
- Enfant Terrible: Jeremy was born evil, having killed and eaten his 3 year old brother when he was just 8.
- Evil Counterpart: Lazarus is this to Harlan. Both are genius bruisers who are intelligent and physically intimidating enough to effortlessly seize control of the prison. But while Harlan is one of the most morally upright of the Coliseum inmates, which isn't saying much, Lazarus is by far the most evil, which is saying a lot.
- Evil Is Bigger: Lazarus is the most feared and evil inmate, and also the biggest, at 6'9" and 423 pounds. He's known as the Coliseum's Paul Bunyan, and can carry two grown men around like toddlers. It's telling that he dwarfs even Harlan, who is already built like a brick shithouse.
- Fate Worse than Death: The whole point of the Coliseum. It was essentially Henry Triggs's petty revenge against the Canadian justice system for outlawing the death penalty.
- Freudian Excuse: Harlan got his Start of Darkness when he was molested as a child by his school groundskeeper.
- Genius Bruiser: Harlan is a 6'5" brute and One-Man Army, but he also has near-genius IQ. But both his brains and brawn are dwarfed by Lazarus, a 6'9" monster with genius IQ.
- Gorn: There are very graphic descriptions of people being Eaten Alive and tortured to death. Special mention goes to one of Charlie's victims, who gets his genitals smoothed out with a power sander and disemboweled with a soldering gun.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Ontario Premier Henry Triggs, the reactionary politician who created the Coliseum in the first place. He's also the reason Albert was sent there, as revenge for killing his scummy son.
- Hellhole Prison: The Coliseum is more of a concentration camp than a correctional facility. Gang violence is not only allowed, but encouraged. And given the scarcity of food, every inmate is perpetually on the brink of starvation, have no ability to bathe, have shut-down organs that leaves them unable to defecate or urinate, and are all trapped in constant darkness that ruins their eyesight, long forgetting what the sun even looked like. This devolves them into anorexic, cannibalistic, albino subhumans trapped in their own filth. And that's not even getting into what's in the basement...
- Hermaphrodite: Lazarus is referred to as "he/she/it" due to his intersex anatomy. And this lets him impregnate himself and birth inbred abominations.
- Horror Hunger: The story's central theme, of how hunger will turn monstrous men even more monstrous. Sometimes literally.
- Inbred and Evil: Lazarus' children are so mutated by inbreeding with each other that they resemble eldritch abominations closer than anything human.
- Incessant Music Madness: The guards are blaring "Hip to Be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News at all times to drive the prisoners crazy.
- Madness Mantra: "You feed me and I feed you and that's what makes the world go round..."
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Harlan 'the Beast' Ruddock, Pierre 'the Butcher of Montreal' Laframboise, and the Skineaters.
- Out-of-Genre Experience: The story is horror through-and-through, but while the first 90% is realistic and mundane grindhouse Torture Porn, the last chapter abruptly spirals into supernatural Body Horror.
- Rape and Revenge: This happens to Harlan not once but twice.
- Serial Killer: The Coliseum is full of them. Lazarus has a body-count of 78, Charlie of 14, Jeremy of 3, and Pierre of 3.
- Sinister Minister: Jackson Cantrell, founder and leader of the Eden Revisited suicide cult. He's essentially Jim Jones if he was too much of a coward to kill himself along with the rest of his followers.
- The Sociopath: This is practically a requirement for a Coliseum inmate, but special mention goes to Jackson, who's a very high-functioning and charismatic example, and Lazarus, who's described by his own psychologist as the human embodiment of "perfect, undiluted, dispassionate evil".
- Soundtrack Dissonance: If you thought American Psycho ruined "Hip To Be Square", wait till you read this.
- Suicide Pact: In a Jonestown Massacre-esque mass suicide, Jackson ordered 487 of his followers to kill themselves and they all happily obliged. Except for the hundreds of children.
