Four stars upon finishing—right before bed, RIP to my dreams—though that rating might change upon morning and more reflection, because wow.

...

Okay. It is morning, and I'm upping my rating to 5 stars. This is undoubtedly my favorite indie extreme horror title that I've read, and I think that deserves recognition.

What separates Fluids from the pack of other gory novellas you can get on Kindle Unlimited?* For me, it's the intensely disturbing things it has to say about love. Namely, that it can be (always is?) obsessive and one-sided and drive(s) even "innocent" (in Dahlia's words) people to do immeasurable harm to one another. There are many quotes I could pull related to this, but this one from Lauren near the end stood out to me: "I want to clean every part of her, but I also want to see all her damage. I want to be the one to inspect her pain. I want to secure her away from all the pain I haven't caused her. She's all for me now."

Gross! my brain responded. And then, God, I hope that's not me! I don't think I've ever read another horror novel that made me want to give it to my ex and ask, "Did I do this to you? Like, metaphorically?"** That's a much more uncomfortable feeling than anything related to gore.

One of the scariest things in the world to me is when someone causes harm to someone else not because they want to hurt them, but because they are convinced that they are doing what's best for their victim. They're even convinced that their victim likes it. And under the blood and shit and bile, that's what Fluids is all about.

It's also all about its trans protagonist, Dahlia, finding her own strength, independence, and will to live through the trials of an incredibly toxic relationship that, in true sapphic fashion, moves way, way too quickly and spins out of control. (I shouldn't have to undermine my own joke, but just in case: Most of us do not kill people about it, though!) I don't know if it's a spoiler or an enticement to say that I found the ending redemptive and hopeful, but one of my favorite quotes is definitely a spoiler, so I'll put it under a cut:

Spoiler

"She made a little love, and she wrote 'Dahlia' on that love and called it mine. It's her love to have. I don't have to share her sentiment. I don't have to share in her love. I am the love of her life, but she's not mine. I am my own love of my life. [...] All the things she did for me. All the things she did to me. No matter what she does, she will never make them have meaning."

So yeah. This book was a ride that made me uneasy, angry, sad, and weirdly hopeful. Like Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse, it might be one of those books that "you enjoy but don't ever tell anyone about it ever" as May says in her video about disturbing books. But I've probably got a five-star rating for Exquisite Corpse floating around here, too, so what the hell. I really enjoyed this book, but please do not take that as a friendly recommendation without checking some content warnings. Please.***

-

*Or purchase a physical copy after spending a week straight listening to May Leitz narrate the NSFL iceberg on YouTube while you knit because that's the only thing that's comforting. Hi, summer 2023 me! You're not doing well!

**Don't worry about my ex. We are on good terms, and unlike me, she would simply never read this book.

***My ex read this and suggested that I include said content warnings, so off the top of my head: violence, murder, torture, rape, gore, vomit, transphobia, parental death, suicide and suicidal ideation, bodily mutilation, drug/alcohol use… and I think that’s it?

Look, no one is more surprised about that 3-star rating than I am.

Cuckoo was probably my most highly-anticipated release of 2024--I read Manhunt right after it came out, and it was the best book I couldn't wait to be done reading because it fucked me up--and up through the first quarter to third of reading, I was fairly sure that it would be my favorite book of the year. As others have noted, the prologue is a well-crafted thing of gooey (in the way of slime, not emotions) genius, and that opening slides you right into harrowing scenes of queer teenagers being kidnapped by conversion therapy camp staffers (kids whose parents, it should be noted, paid said staffers good money to kidnap them).

Over the next little bit, you meet the different kids at the camp and get snippets of their various traumatic backstories interspersed with the trauma of their current plotline, watching them interact and go from distrust to desperate friendship (and attraction). Some readers have noted that there are too many POVs bouncing around, and there is a lot of that, but it didn't bother me as much because it serves the theme of

Spoiler

being groomed to assimilate into an alien hivemind

.

But around the midway point and the

Spoiler

magic mushroom-fueled teenage orgy

, Cuckoo started to lose me a little and never fully recovered. I started to wonder if Gretchen ran into time constraints and the latter chapters didn't get as much workshopping, because while the first 70% of the book is fleshed out well, the last third crams in so much more than you would expect it to in such a small space:

Spoiler

what happened after the kids' escape, how they've changed and what they've been doing as adults, the discovery of another Cuckoo camp, planning to raid it, raiding it, AND an epilogue. Jesus, right?

The result is a bit threadbare. I wanted more character development, more showing, more time for the story to unfold. There are many shades of IT here, and I think that to have the kind of richness the ITs of the world need to work well, you maybe gotta give them 1,000 pages or so.

There are also a couple of pet-peeve kind of things at play, so your mileage may vary here. But there's a horny edgelord tone to the writing that didn't quite land with me, not because I'm anti-horny edgelordiness (I've been known to dabble in such notions myself), but because it got very repetitive and abrasive. This might have exacerbated my other peeve, which was that the longer I read, the more I realized that I didn't actually like most of the characters. They weren't unlikeable in ways that I found compelling. They were just annoying in the way of queer drama and yes yes yes, that was probably the point, and they are probably deeply relatable to a lot of queer people, but dear reader, I am something of a misanthrope and despite my queerness do find a lot of us deeply annoying IRL, too.

I don't want to leave this review on a negative note, so I will say that this book does both real-life horror and creature feature horror very well. I am a legendarily hard scare, but there are scenes that made my heart beat faster. I kept thinking about how much I would love to see Cuckoo adapted into a gross movie, full of sopping wet puppets and buckets of slime and fake blood.

So there you have it. My shockingly complicated feelings about Cuckoo. If "IT and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and They Live, but make it queer" sounds good to you, go for it. Because I know that this will be a 5-star book for other people, and I'm open to hearing why.

This is not quite the book I was expecting based on reviews. And while perhaps I should harbor some resentment toward how hyperbolic said reviews tend to be, I can't with an entirely clean conscience because, well, didn't those reviews catch my eye? Don't I read many books based on someone's assertion that they're too disgusting to get through, thinking, "Well, we'll see about that"?

Nevertheless, I think that discussing this book in terms of how gory and disgusting it is not only is a bit hyperbolic but distracts from the really interesting parts: How Maeve conceives of herself and her place (or lack thereof) in society, and her engagement with misanthropic literature. Maeve Fly the book and Maeve Fly the character not only know what genre they are in, but they also explicitly engage in conversation with the classics of said genre. Specifically, Bataille's Story of the Eye, Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, and Ellis's American Psycho provide both epigraphs and important touchstones for Maeve Fly. Understanding them is important for understanding Maeve on both a character and a book level.

Because Maeve is a character without a place, but one who is forced to try to make one for herself, anyway. (Does any one of us have the option of not finding a way to fit into society somehow?) She knows that she does not fit within society, that the rage (and let's say it, psychopathy) that she harbors inside herself positions her as an outsider, preventing her from ever truly connecting with most people because she can never reveal her true self. One of her tragedies is that she is all too aware of her predicament; her other is that despite her efforts to carve out a space within which she can function, the inevitabilities of death and change eventually deprive her of it.

She is a character in search of depravity and sensation as in Bataille, a character who loses herself to literature and thought but eventually simultaneously craves/reviles the embrace of society as in Dostoevsky, and a character who... Well, I'll let you decide for yourself how much she emulates Ellis.

See, why spend a bunch of time listing gory murders

Spoiler

that maybe never even happened, given Maeve's identification with Patrick Bateman and her explicit statement that not all the stories we tell ourselves about our lives are true

when we can talk about intertextuality instead? Isn't that more fun?

Not quite sure how I felt about this book, as it’s genuinely one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever read. I liked the triple perspectives and seeing how the characters came together. I thought that the pandemic angle was interesting and genuinely scary given the times we’ve all recently lived through. And if you’re looking for extreme body horror in a cosmic horror context, this is your book. Similar to Caitlín R. Kiernan, though with a less experimental/hallucinatory vibe.

Lately I've read a handful of horror novellas that fell short of their promises, but True Crime is not one of them. It manages the difficult task of presenting a story that is extreme and transgressive in its violence, while maintaining well-crafted prose and a nihilistic perspective that feels earned. Suzy is a character you feel for even when you're repulsed by her actions, and riding along in her head on a murder spree and beyond was an experience that will stick with me. Highly recommended for wizened horror fans who listen to Ethel Cain maybe a tad too much. CWs for

Spoiler

child sexual abuse, rape, murder, animal abuse, animal death

.

Waif caught my attention immediately. I mean, that cover! Underground plastic surgery! A queer girl gang! It sounded like the stuff my feminist horror dreams are made of.

And there are elements of this book that I adored. The sections about the protagonist's efforts to suppress her queerness--and even her own knowledge of her queerness--are an excellent depiction of compulsory heterosexuality, so relatable that they left me floored. All the stuff about her realizing that she must walk through the world of men alone? Yeah, that's real. That made me shiver.

It also tickled me to see the found family trope in a story completely divorced from the wholesome, bloodless, uwu context in which you typically see it. Because deep down I am a grizzled thing made out of rawhide and razorblades and I have a demon inside me that cannot abide joy, I guess.

But I also thought that Waif needed more time to develop its characters, their relationships, and their motivations. As it was, the plot felt a bit disjointed and I kept thinking, "Okay, but why is [character] doing [thing]?

Spoiler

If her husband doesn't value her and thinks you can replace anything/anyone with enough money... why is he down to get plastic surgery to be attractive to her? Wouldn't it be easier to cast her aside and get a different wife?

"

Verdict: I like the ideas Kolesnik is working toward, but I just think they needed a couple hundred more pages to percolate and a little more finesse.

1. Every bathroom door I’ve ever seen has opened inward unless the bathroom was the size of a closet.

2. The only character I didn’t hate was the rattlesnake.

HOO BOY. I have read and loved yet another book that I cannot recommend to anyone without them thinking there is something wrong with me, and you know what? Maybe there IS something wrong with me, because I ate a cheeseburger while listening to the last 20 minutes of this.

Tell Me I'm Worthless is a lot of things: harrowing, ambitious, thought-provoking, very online. It's an unsubtle book for an unsubtle age, each metaphor laid bare against the threat of (willful) misunderstanding. And it's a book with an underlying bleakness that I don't think I can agree with and continue to carry on with my life and the project of standing up against the rolling tide of fascism in whatever small ways I'm able to. But it's also not a lot of other things people are saying it is (because there are always people ready to accuse every trans woman alive of misogyny just for breathing), and I'm glad that I read it... I think? Yeah. But it was not a good time. CW for gore/body horror; depictions of transmisogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, and racism; and sexual assault.

Manhunt does what it does excellently and with style, but what it does is unflinching, brutal horror that had me dreading every sentence I read. It's one of the best books that I could not wait to be finished reading so that I didn't have to read any more. About 50 pages from the end, I actually thought, "You know, things are going okay for Beth and Indi. Maybe I should just stop now, so nothing bad will happen to them." But of course I kept going to the very end.

This won't be for everyone, not just because it's bleak, splattery horror, but because if you're not trans or know a lot of trans people and are immersed in trans Twitter, it won't hit the same. The entire book feels like the worst TERF hate spiral come to apocalyptic life. You need to know TERF ideology and language. You need to know trans stuff beyond 101. I anticipate that a lot of people will come away from this book (or will abandon it partially-read) angry/confused because they just don't get it. And that's not Gretchen Felker-Martin's fault.

I think that Manhunt is an important contribution to horror literature, and I think it's essential reading if you're interested in gender in horror. Mind your trigger warnings, though.