Disclaimer: I received an e-arc of this book by the publisher Tenebrous Press. 

 

In this Weird body horror novella, an abduction leaves a couple separated and, by the time they reunite, irreparably changed. The man has undergone medical experimentation, his body spliced together with that of an unknown woman, and he is pregnant with something he can not understand. The woman’s mind has split in two, existing partially in reality and partially in abstract terror. They have both been taken to the same hospital for rare conditions, but the treatment might make everything worse and soon things spiral into weirder and weirder places. 

This novella explores bodily autonomy, body horror and medical trauma, wraps it into gore and surrealism and garnishes it with a lot of extreme horror imagery. While this book wasn’t easy to read, taking the reader on a wild ride with twists and turns and sometimes very strange scene changes, I enjoyed it a lot. The author’s writing style really shines when it comes to body horror and gore and the dissociative weirdness of trauma and I enjoyed following the dissection of the main characters’ minds and experiences. I really enjoyed the way the scene and POV changes worked in tandem to leave me guessing what is real and what is a hallucination. 

Once again Tenebrous Press published another win for Weird horror with a capital W. While this story might not be for people who want a clear straightforward story or easy fleshed-out answers to everything, if you allow yourself to be taken captive by the story and follow with the twisting plot you will be rewarded by a world grander and more terrifying than you can imagine. I adored it! 

TW: animal abuse, body horror, car accident, child abuse, colonialism, death, dissociation, eye trauma, forced birth, forced impregnation, gender/body dysphoria, gore, hallucinations, kidnapping, medical abuse, medical experimentation, murder, mutilation, pregnancy horror/trauma, restraints, implied sexual violence, suicide, torture, unreality, violence, suggested violence towards an infant