Review: The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper

Posted on February 3, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The Marbled Swarm is Dennis Cooper’s most haunting work to date. In secret passageways, hidden rooms, and the troubled mind of our narrator, a mystery perpetually takes shape—and the most compelling clue to its final nature is “the marbled swarm” itself, a complex amalgam of language passed down from father to son.

Cooper ensnares the reader in a world of appearances, where the trappings of high art, old money, and haute cuisine obscure an unspeakable system of coercion and surrender. And as the narrator stalks an elusive truth, traveling from the French countryside to Paris and back again, the reader will be seduced by a voice only Dennis Cooper could create.

Review:

The Marbled Swarm is the first novel by Dennis Cooper ever recommended to me. This was years ago, and I did pick up a copy of the novel in 2016. It was shuffled in with a great deal of other books. I have had The Marbled Swarm, but it was The Sluts that I read first. I’m glad that I did. If The Marbled Swarm was the first Dennis Cooper novel I read, I probably would not read another.

The story is told through an unreliable narrator who is using a technique that he has learned from his father. The marbled swarm is the use of language and speech as a mask to hide who the person really is. The narrator grows up in a large house that is filled with secret passages, and in the beginning of the novel, he is looking at purchasing a chateau that also has a great deal of secret passages where the owner spies on his sons, just like the narrator’s father spies on him and his brother while growing up. The oldest son has died and is haunting the chateau and the younger son, a fourteen year old Emo kid, is desperate to leave. The narrator also says he is a killer and a cannibal so the thought of cooking up a young kid is enticing.

The houses in this novel are a metaphor for the narrator himself. They are large, empty houses with secret passages that are more enticing due to their mystery that their function. It seems as if the narrator is fairly empty except for the secrets that really have more mystery than function. In the end, his story might be more about his gathering of different personalities and using them as a mask to show that he really is not that interesting at all. 


I have not read all of Dennis Cooper’s novels, but I will say that I like his novels that are straight forward and unabashed in their depravity over this type of narration. The unreliable narrator is Dennis Cooper’s favorite device. He finds it entertaining to pull the rug out from under his readers, making us think something is happening when it was all a fraud, or nothing is happening and it is all a deviant plot. Mixed in with gruesome sex and death scenes. This playfulness is The Marbled Swarm. Cooper concentrates more on tricks and plots than telling a story. The narrator even breaks the fourth wall a few times to talk to the reader, instructing you to do things for him. All of this is intentional. He wants to show us a mystery and secret passages, but it might just be a trick. I would recommend Dennis Cooper to everyone, but I would not start with this novel.

Other works by author reviewed:

The Sluts

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Review: Hard Girls by J. Robert Lennon

Posted on January 26, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Two estranged twin sisters as they hunt down their elusive mother in this razor-sharp crime novel from “master of the dark arts” J. Robert Lennon. (Kelly Link)

Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life. When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.

Set in both the Pool family’s past and their present, and melding elements of a chase novel, an espionage thriller, and domestic suspense, Hard Girls is an utterly distinctive pastiche—propulsive, mysterious, cracked, intelligent, and unexpected at every turn.

Review:

Hard Girls, the new novel by J. Robert Lennon follows an estranged set of twins, Lila and Jane, while they look for their estranged mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. The twins have not seen each other in years, and Jane is okay with that. She has made a pretty normal life for herself. She works at the university, is a mother to a preteen and a wife to her high school sweetheart. The real problems she faces are her mother-in-law and watching her father. When Lila shows up and says she thinks she has found their mother, not only does Jane travel with Lila across America to find her, but she risks losing her safe life and all of the things she had built to hide her past.

The timeline switches between past and present, and while the story unfold and the family secrets are revealed, there really is a sense that all of the characters are family. Sure there are some quirks that make them different, but all of them have the same major character trait, the one that has led them all to this point in their lives. They share a detached personality, one that is more comfortable hiding information and feelings more than expressing them. The title, Hard Girls, is really perfect, because these women are hard. They are emotionally detached, do not show any vulnerability, and quite honestly are only out for their own gains. It feels like Jane has lived with this too with the way that she interacts with her husband and daughter, but there is also a conscience in her that has grown due to having a child, something that did not happen in her mother or sister. The way that they all interact makes Hard Girls a well-written and compelling story.

J. Robert Lennon writes a variety of literary novels and short stories, and he uses the tagline “A Jane and Lila Pool Thriller” on the title page of this novel. This leads some to speculate that there are going to be more in the series, but I would not be surprised if this is the tagline so that we go into the story thinking about it in a certain way. Hard Girls is going to be a thriller, and it is in a J. Robert Lennon way. The pacing, twists, and reveals lean more toward a literary novel than a thriller novel, and those who want unpredictable danger and harrowing escapes will be disappointed. However Hard Girls is a fast-paced and engaging story. I read most of it in a day-long session without getting bored or needing a break. I have been a fan of Lennon’s work for a long time, and this does not disappoint as a Lennon book as it might disappoint some who are looking for an edge-of-your-seat thriller. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: The Stranger Upstairs by Lisa M Matlin

Posted on January 24, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A social media influencer with a secret past buys a murder house to renovate, but finds more than she bargained for behind the peeling wallpaper in this gothic psychological debut.

Sarah Slade is starting over. As the new owner of the infamous Black Wood House—the scene of a grisly murder-suicide—she’s determined that the fixer-upper will help reach a new audience on her successful lifestyle blog, and distract her from her failing marriage.

But as Sarah paints over the house’s horrifying past, she knows better than anyone that a new façade can’t conceal every secret. Then the builders start acting erratically and experiencing bizarre accidents—and Sarah knows there’s only so long she can continue to sleep in the bedroom with the bloodstained floor and suffer the mysterious footsteps she hears from the attic.

When menacing notes start appearing everywhere, Sarah becomes convinced that someone or something is out to kill her—her husband, her neighbors, maybe even the house itself. The more she remodels Black Wood House, the angrier it seems to become.

With every passing moment, Sarah’s life spirals further out of control—and with it, her sense of reality. Though she desperately clings to the lies she’s crafted to conceal her own secrets, Sarah Slade must wonder . . . was it all worth it? Or will this house be her final unraveling?

Review:

The premise of Lisa M. Matlin’s debut thriller, The Stranger Upstairs is strong from the start. Sarah Slade and her husband Joe have bought Black Woods House to renovate and resell. This house has not been lived in for 40 years, after a man murdered his family and himself inside. Strange things start happening to Sarah, and soon she is wondering how safe she is in the house. Even though it desperately needs renovations, the house does not seem to want to be fixed.

Sarah is a great character, a therapist who has one bestselling self-help book and is supposed to be working on a second, a marriage counselor, a fledgling Instagram influencer, and completely unreliable. As the novel unfolds, Sarah unravels. She descends into deeper paranoia, with the town hating her because they do not want Black Woods House to be occupied but demolished, and her husband becoming more and more distant, Sarah really falls apart. The lies build up, and we are left with a person who was never as she seemed.

Thrillers rely heavily on big revels and plot twists. I like novels that reveal too much at the beginning more than novels that wait until the end to have the big twists. I like that the narrator has to figure out how to deal with the new information. This is why I enjoyed The Stranger Upstairs more than many other thrillers. The big reveal is halfway through the novel, and the second half is figuring out how the fallout is going to effect the rest of the book. During the entire second half, Sarah’s actions get stranger and more erratic until the inevitable happens. 

The Stranger Upstairs might not win any awards, but it really is a fun novel. I enjoyed it more than I expected, and this was one of those novels that seemed to move faster and faster the more I read. There are some things that make this more enjoyable as a physical read than an audiobook. The police reports and news articles intercut between chapters are from the future so the timeline gets a little screwy, and Matlin relies heavily on fonts to show the difference between blog posts, notes, and the action following them. These things worked well in print, but I have not heard good things about the audiobook. Keeping this in mind, The Stranger Upstairs is a short, fun, fast paced, satisfying story, and I loved every minute of it. 

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Review: Fury: A Novel by Clyo Mendoza

Posted on January 20, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Seven Stories Press, Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

In this devastating novel, Clyo Mendoza, a Mexican poet and novelist in her twenties, weaves together multiple narratives into a lyrical, shape-shifting existential reflection on love, violence, and the power of myth.

“ Fury has the poetic and wild force of the desert. In its pages there is tenderness, fear and forceful, rhythmic writing with images that are difficult to forget. It is about the violence of desire that turns us into dogs that drool, howl and bite, but also about love in the midst of hostility and helplessness. This is why it is a disturbing and, at the same time, deeply moving novel.” —Mónica Ojeda

In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lázaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men—and of their mothers, lovers and companions—Mendoza explores her characters’ passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them.

After winning the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, and silence, Fury offers a moving questioning of the complexity of love and suffering. The desert is where these characters’ destinies become intertwined, where their wounds are inherited and bled dry. Readers will be blown away by the sensitivity of the writing, and will shudder at the way violence conveyed with a poetic forcefulness and a fierce mastery of the Mexican oral tradition.

Review:

Most of the time, when I think of weird fiction, I think of stories that have more of a speculative plot. Stories that take place in alternate universes or timelines, or just odd life occurrences happening to normal people. In Fury by Clyo Mendoza, she writes another type of weird fiction, one where the people are weird and trying to navigate a seemingly normal universe. The book is split into five sections, and each on of them focuses on one of three half-brothers, Lazaro, Juan, or Salvador. The common thread between these three is their father, Vincente, a predator, womanizer, and man who eventually goes crazy and dies as a dog. Each of of his sons play an important role in the lives of the other brothers, and all of them try to scourge him from their personalities. The two motivations of every man in this novel is either sex or revenge, both being equally important and equally destructive to everyone. 

There are so many interesting things that happen during the journey through Fury. All of the stories of the men, looking for their love or their revenge, end up with them broken. There is no real outcomes to the anger or jealousy that motivates them, nothing good comes from this. This makes Fury not only a epic journey for all of those involved, but a cautionary tale. The emotions that motivate us will sometimes destroy us if we are not careful. None of the men learn this lesson. There is no redemption. This is what makes this novel somewhat hard to read. Most of the stories readers enjoy are stories where a lesson is learned and the misguided character finds redemption at the end. There is none of this in Fury. Instead we get a group of misguided characters, lost in the desert, motivated by anger or lust, and not a single person finds any sort of solace in the outcome of their actions. 

This does not stop their journeys from being compelling. The story is bleak and the characters are broken people breaking others, but the writing is beautiful. It is not surprising that Clyo Mendoza is an award winning poet. What is surprising is that she is barely thirty writing novels with this much depth and darkness. She seems to have a connection to the ugliness in the spirit of man that many writers want but do not have. So many of her paragraphs and scenes that are artful and mind blowing, and the story as a whole, of weird people interacting with a normal world, is written in such a compelling way that we sometimes forget that the people involved are pretty terrible people. Clyo Mendoza is easily one of the best young writers I have read in a long time.


I received an ARC of Fury through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.    

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Review: My Death by Lisa Tuttle

Posted on January 12, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.

The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.

But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?

Review:

I see a great deal of Tik Toks and Instagram Reels about “top strange books”, “five weird novellas you should read”, “WTF books”, and videos of this ilk. Most of the time, I am not influenced much by them. I did read and enjoy Bear by Marian Engel because of one of these videos, so I cannot say I am completely above the influence of these videos, but most of the time I have enough to read. When My Death by Lisa Tuttle started to come up in these “weird lit” videos, I knew I could give it a chance because I already owned a copy.

My Death is about a writer who has lost a husband a year and a half earlier and had not written anything since. Suddenly she inspired by a painting by W.E. Logan, to write a biography about the model of the painting Helen Ralston. Helen, a novelist in her own right, and Willy Logan had a passionate, tumultuous affair that included Helen falling (being pushed? jumping?) out of a window. After the narrator decides to write the biography, she is surprised to learn that Helen is still alive, at 94, lucid, and waiting for her to visit. The novella is engaging and near perfect. I do not want to really say anything other than it needs to be read by as many people as possible.


I skipped the introduction when reading My Death because I am a reader that wants to know as little as possible about any book I read. Going back afterward, Amy Gentry starts her introduction with the fact that readers love to know about lives of writers, and we are always fascinated with meeting our literary heroes. She then starts to talk about the life of Lisa Tuttle. Being friends with Harlan Ellison, dating and writing her first novel with George R.R. Martin, having a short marriage to Christopher Priest, Lisa Tuttle’s works stand out, and she is considered one of the best writers you have never heard of. The wild thing about this biography of Tuttle is that I am doing the same thing that the narrator in My Death did for Helen Ralston. Yes I want to know about the body of work, but I am much more interested in the relationship that Tuttle had with these men. I could say that someone should write a biography about Tuttle, but I am like the narrator in My Death. I do not want to know about the art as much as the relationships that she has had. This desire to know what is behind the curtains of the art is the driving force behind the novella, and My Death plays perfectly into this voyeuristic tendency.

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Review: Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

Posted on January 9, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

WOMB CITY imagines a dark and deadly future Botswana, rich with culture and true folklore, which begs the question: how far must one go to destroy the structures of inequality upon which a society was founded? How far must a mother go to save the life of her child?

Nelah seems to have it all: wealth, fame, a husband, and a child on the way. But in a body her husband controls via microchip and the tailspin of a loveless marriage, her hopes and dreams come to a devastating halt. A drug-fueled night of celebration ends in a hit-and-run. To dodge a sentencing in a society that favors men, Nelah and her side-piece, Janith Koshal, finish the victim off and bury the body.

But the secret claws its way into Nelah’s life from the grave. As her victim’s vengeful ghost begins exacting a bloody revenge on everyone Nelah holds dear, she’ll have to unravel her society’s terrible secrets to stop those in power, and become a monster unlike any other to quench the ghost’s violent thirst.

Review:

Tlotlo Tsamaase came onto my radar last month when I read The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2022. The anthology is packed with incredible stories, but the two that really stick out are the two written by Tsammase. When I learned that xer first novel was going to be released this month, I had to read it. Luckily, Netgalley and Erewhon Books allowed me to read an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

There are several reasons to love this novel before I even read the first sentences. The first is that Womb City is a wonderful title, and the cover art elicits so many different mental images, so many different curiosities that are about to unfold. The story starts with Nelah waking and her husband Elifasi wanting to hook her up to the wall with her microchip to make sure that she is not thinking about crime. The society that is built in Womb City, this dystopian Botswana, is filled with corruption, male superiority, power struggles, and men being leaders of everything, even though women are the backbone of society. In the first sections, the novel a marital drama about Nelah and Elifasi trying to have a child, trying to keep their finances in order, and trying to get along with each other. Neither of them trusts the other. All of this time, a wealthy business owner, Janith, becomes Nelah’s lover, and keeping this a secret quickly turns Nelah’s life upside down.

Womb City starts as a sci-fi novel, with consciousness jumping from body to body and the politics of this, from the rights of criminals to immigration waiting lists (those with money to the front of the line), investigations for criminals that might commit another crime in the future, and a mist on Sundays that is really the release of markers for the location of hidden dead bodies. The novel quickly turns from a sci-fi novel into straight horror. There are scenes that rival any horror novel I have ever read. The vengeance and anger at the core of the novel slowly turns the book into a conspiracy thriller that morphs the novel into a new, even worse type of horror, because the horrible acts that people are doing to one another is worse than any wrath of an ancient god. 

At some points in the novel, I started thinking that Tlotlo Tsamaase wrote xer book with the idea in mind that this could be the only book xhe ever releases so xhe must put every idea xhe has into the plot. There are so many things that happen, so many different directions that this novel takes, and so many social issues that are examined, that it is impossible to really catch all of it the first time. It is exhausting, but in the way that you feel after a good run, the exhilaration of getting to the end makes the journey worth it. There are moments that feel like they could be slimmed down some, but as a whole, Tlotlo does so many great things in this novel that I will look for everything that xhe writes. I cannot get enough. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was by Sjón

Posted on January 5, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The mind-bending miniature historical epic is Sjón’s specialty, and Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was is no exception. But it is also Sjón’s most realistic, accessible, and heartfelt work yet. It is the story of a young man on the fringes of a society that is itself at the fringes of the world–at what seems like history’s most tumultuous, perhaps ultimate moment.

Máni Steinn is queer in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland’s shores. And if the flu doesn’t do it, there’s always the threat that war will spread all the way north. And yet the outside world has also brought Icelanders cinema! And there’s nothing like a dark, silent room with a film from Europe flickering on the screen to help you escape from the overwhelming threats–and adventures–of the night, to transport you, to make you feel like everything is going to be all right. For Máni Steinn, the question is whether, at Reykjavik’s darkest hour, he should retreat all the way into this imaginary world, or if he should engage with the society that has so soundly rejected him.

Review:

Sjón is a Icelandic writer who has written songs with Bjork (including the Academy Award nominated song for the Lars Von Trier film Dancer in the Dark), written screenplays (most notably Lamb and the Robert Egger’s collaboration, The Northman), and over a dozen fiction and poetry books. I have read and reviewed CoDex 1962 and Red Milk, and when I stumble on any of his books in the bookstore, I pick it up.

What Sjon does in Moonstone: The Boy that Never Was is a huge reason why I seek out his work. Máni Steinn is an orphan that lives in an attic with a distant relative. He is obsessed with movies, watching every film shown at both the old cinema and the new cinema in Reykjavik. He is  obsessed with a girl who drives an old Indian motorcycle around town, and he makes money by having sexual encounters with men (one is an English speaking man who’s pronunciation of Mani Stein sounds like Moonstone). The story takes place during a few months in 1918, when the Spanish Flu rips through the town and changes everything. Máni observes the town getting more and more sick, the cinema emptying out, his dates disappearing, and the amount of the dead piling up. He almost becomes one of the number himself. Sjón’s writing and Victoria Cribb’s translation brings the reader into this dark world, making us part of the dying city. The writing is crisp and sharp, but the story is so bleak. We are transported into the middle of and Iceland that is cold and dying of sickness, and we can feel the fever, death, and sadness spreading through every house.


Nothing about this novel can change. It is rare to be so transported into a world so fleshed out by an author using so few words. The novel is less than 150 pages, and many of those pages are blank. For Sjón to write such a strong and powerful novel in such a small space really shows how good he is. Sjón is one of the best writers in the world, and Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was is proof.

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Review: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Posted on January 2, 2024 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Review:

After publishing a few acclaimed poetry collections, Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr!, is to be released later this month. The novel starts with Cyrus Shams, a poet, recovering drug and alcohol addict, and someone is trying find meaning, not only in life but in death. His mother is killed in 1988 on Flight 655, an Iranian commercial flight shot down by the United States military. He is a baby at the time. Afterward, he and his father move from Iran to Indiana, where his father worked at a chicken farm. Cyrus grows up, but he does not grow out of the feeling of his mother, and eventually the death of his father as soon as he goes to college. Martyr! is Cyrus’s journey post family and post drugs to figure out if his mother and father’s death has meaning at all. This journey leads him to the idea of writing a book about martyrs, which leads him and his friend Zee from Indiana to Brooklyn, where an Iranian-born artist is publicly dying of breast cancer. She is at the Brooklyn Museum meeting people every day to talk about whatever they want until she eventually dies. Her hospice is on display for art. Cyrus wants to know if her death is art, thus making it more meaningful than other deaths. Meeting her changes everything for him.

This story is not straight forward or complete. We are given large chunks of the story, not only Cyrus’s life, but the life of his parents, what his mother felt when she was boarding the plane on her fateful trip, how military service messed up Cyrus’s uncle, and how his father felt after losing his wife, but we are also allowed to fill in the blanks. Chapters are written from the perspective of everyone, from Cyrus, from Cyrus’s mother, father, and uncle, and from the dying artist herself. There are chapters that are fictionalized conversations between famous people that Cyrus uses to help him fall asleep at night (which we could have used a few more of these). We are also given snippets of the book of martyrs that Cyrus is writing: poems and paragraphs explaining the depths of what death can mean. Cyrus has collected all of these pieces, and he hopes this can mean something.

The writing is fantastic, and the story is gripping. I was more invested in these characters and this story than any other book in a long time. There are some moments when Kaveh Akbar writes very deep conversations between two characters and the narrative does seem to stall a bit, but most of the novel is flawless, exciting, and quite possibly one of the best books I will read this year. 

I reviewed this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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Review: Squirm by Hugo Bernard

Posted on December 31, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon

Synopsis:

Steve’s friend has exclusive access to a new substance to promote muscle mass. The plan is to get rich once the boys see how insanely huge it makes him. But when his sweet girlfriend throws him across the room with freakish force, he knows something has gone terribly wrong. He messed up, and the girlfriend he loves might never be the same because of it. The dead bodies are piling up as Steve searches for a way to undo his mistake. Swept from one bloody horror to the next, he will need more than brute force to survive the chaos of the night and get back to save his girl.

Fans of supernatural thrillers and unexpected twists are sure to get a satisfying dopamine rush out of this quick and grossly entertaining read! WARNING Contains profanity, debauchery and violence.

Review:

Squirm is the first in the Tales of GymBro Horror series written by Hugo Bernard. I was honestly hooked on this series by the idea of “Gymbro Horror.” There is something about going to the gym and seeing all of the gymbros and gym rats who spend so much of their life trying to get bigger, look better, get swole, and be attractive to their partners, potential partners, and hopefully themselves. Some of it is with good intentions, but like with any sort of culture, there is a dark underbelly. I look forward to reading horror stories based on the whole gym scene. 

The basic concepts of Squirm fit into the desires that many people in the gym want: to be bigger, stronger, larger than anyone else in the gym. Most steroid use is not by professional athletes or fitness competitors, but by the guy next door who wants more muscles. Steve is a guy who is teetering on the edge of what he can do next to get bigger. He sees one of his friends getting huge at an alarming pace, and this friend introduces him to something called FrogJuice. He has also nicknamed it Squirm, due to the tadpole looking things that are swimming around in the drink. Squirm makes Steve pack on pounds of muscle in a short period of time, get a gym girlfriend, and start making a ton of money. Then the strange side effects begin, particularly when some of the women around him get it into their system. Before long, the semi-good idea of taking Squirm turns into a horrible idea, and Steve finds himself in more trouble that he ever expected.

There are some elements of good horror, but the bigger focus of the story is the danger that Steve gets into, from rival testosterone sellers, from scientists who studied Squirm, from women who have accidently taken it and turned monsters, from the military, from himself. There are good chase scenes, many kills, but the real interesting part, the dynamics of the infection, is just sort of glossed over. I would have liked to seen more concentration of the grisly body horror aspects of the story, because there really is some great potential that just seems passed by. 


The second in this series, called Shredz, is coming out in March. I am not going to lie. I am all for another installment of Gymbro horror. This was fast paced, fun, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I cannot wait to see what Hugo Bernard does next with the series.

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Review: Liquid Snakes by Stephen Kearse

Posted on December 26, 2023 by ghostvillehero

Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? A Black biochemist provides an answer in this wildly original novel of pollution, poison, and dark pleasure

In Atlanta, Kenny Bomar is a biochemist-turned-coffee-shop-owner in denial about his divorce and grieving his stillborn daughter. Chemicals killed their child, leaching from a type of plant the government is hiding in Black neighborhoods. Kenny’s coping mechanisms are likewise chemical and becoming more baroque—from daily injections of lethal snake venom to manufacturing designer drugs. As his grief turns corrosive, it taints every person he touches.

Black epidemiologists Retta and Ebonee are called to the scene when a mysterious black substance is found to have killed a high school girl. Investigating these “blackouts” sends the women down separate paths of blame and retribution as two seemingly disparate narratives converge in a cinematic conclusion.

Liquid Snakes is an immersive, white-knuckle ride with the spookiness of speculative fiction and the propulsion of binge-worthy shows like FX’s Atlanta and HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness. Transfiguring a whodunit plot into a labyrinthine reinterpretation of a crime procedural, Stephen Kearse offers an uncanny commentary on an alternative world, poisoned.

Review:

When Liquid Snakes was released this past August, I saw ads for days on all of my social media. Most of the time, I can ignore the ads, but this one seemed persistent. The name of the book, along with the cover and author photo intrigued me. I am not a synopsis reader by nature. I like to go into books as cold as I can. This means I usually judge a book by it’s cover and by the press that published it. Soft Skull Press has been around for decades, and it is a press I have loved for a long time. For me to be inundated by ads for a novel to be released by Soft Skull Press, with the name, cover, and author photo that it had, I just had an inkling that this would be a book I would enjoy. They were right.

The story is split in half. The first is Kenny Bomar, a coffee shop owner who has also made a drug that will literally melt anyone who drinks it, turning them into a black hole of sludge right where they are standing. The second is about Ebonee and Retta, two women who work for the CDC that are trying to follow the trail of the drug and it’s manufacture, while also dealing with tensions between each other and everyone whom they have to negotiate with. 

This is not a typical novel. There are weird quirks and sections that barely make sense to the rest of the novel at the time. Some moments pretend to pull away from the story, but there are also some of these parts that make me think that this story is bigger than the story that is being told. Stephen Kearse does not spend much time putting these pieces of the puzzle together for you, but lets you put them together in any order that you see fit. This is why some readers have had a hard time following the plot. The plot is not specific, and this is why different people will catch different meanings in this novel, and also why this novel is a good one to reread.

Even though Stephen Kearse has an interesting story in process, there are moments when he addresses the way that people in this country, black people specifically, are categorized and when they do not fit into the mold that is already built for them. White people do not always know how to react. Ebonee and Retta has more issues with this seeing as how many of the people they are trying to work with on their investigation, the men in charge, dismiss them immediately. This is when they go along their own path. Kenny also spends the entire novel going down his own path, and he is a character that does not hide his emotions. He has lost a child, and he is pissed at everyone, particularly those who let it happen. His grieving is going to affect everyone around him and his drug is manufactured from a place of anger and grief. He does not want retribution or reparations. He wants revenge. There are ideas in this novel that are much much bigger than the space that the idea is given, so this does make for a novel that feels a little off-kilter in places, and a little unfinished in others. This is not a perfect novel, but it is definitely a novel that will make me read Stephen Kearse’s next book.


Sometimes people ask me how I find the books that I read, movies that I watch, and music I listen to. I find that the easiest answer is that I do not look for these things anymore, but they all find me. Liquid Snakes is one of the prime examples of a book that found me. I am glad to have given it a chance, and the ad algorithm was right. This is the type of novel I enjoy, and I gravitate toward.

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