Hello yes, I just have one question - what the actual fuck?

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC in exchange for me being thoroughly and utterly grossed out! I haven’t read Grudova’s first collection OR Children of Paradise, but I’m not sure that I would have been anymore prepared for The Coiled Serpent if I had. Every possible taboo you could think of is covered in these stories, every bodily fluid, every fucked up thing a person could do to another person, it’s all here. Grudova is clearly all about pushing boundaries, but I did often find myself asking what the point in some of the stories was. I’m quite a literal person, and so I’m always trying to figure out if there is a ~message~ or if these stories were just grotesque for the sake of it, to let the author’s creative juices flow. And lots of juices are indeed flowing, let me tell you 😩

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The stories do differ, but they all play on similar themes - creepy houses, oppressed & used women, food scarcity, revenge and unrequited sexual obsession. I wouldn’t consider myself a squeamish reader but my honestly this collection had me feeling physically nauseous more than once. My favourite stories were the less in-your-face shock value ones. The Green Room, for instance, where a woman whose daughter was killed due to a chemist’s negligence plays a long game of revenge. Or The Poison Garden, where a custodian of a Tudor house cultivates a garden full of poisonous plants which a young man thieves to nefarious and sinister ends.

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Towards the end of the collection, the stories start getting more extreme, think cannibalism, self-combusting bodies, and I started to feel a bit drained from the constant gore. I prefer my dark stories to be a little subtler, I think!

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Overall I’d say a mixed bag, but Grudova’s creativity and sense of atmosphere has got me curious about picking up her earlier works sooner rather than later!