This was a whole book of face scrunching, twitching, scrunching up of eyes while looking away, and making strangled little "blargh" noises. That said, the writing is gorgeous and some of the characters are going to stay with me forever I'm sure as I was able to see them so clearly.

Sooo, if you can handle some very specific squidgey, stomach twisting scenes a la Dead Ringers with some amazing storytelling, this may be just the book for you. ( )

I wanted so bad to love this one. I'd read his collection of short stories, [b:Knife Fight and Other Struggles|22358602|Knife Fight and Other Struggles|David Nickle|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1401551390s/22358602.jpg|41459846], and adored it.

And, to be fair, there's actually nothing wrong with this novel. The story is interesting, the characters...well, slightly less so to me, but not bad, and the writing is quite good. But somewhere in that mix, something just didn't quite gel for me. So, about 80 pages in, I set it down and decided to not try anymore.

Not horrible. Just not for me, I guess.

On paper, this seems like something I'd love - fairy legends, eugenics, disease. In reality, it didn't grab me AT ALL. The audiobook narrator was great, but I couldn't stay focused and ended up setting it to triple speed for the last 2 hours just so I could get through it. ( )

The plot felt like it kind of ran away from itself throughout pretty much the whole book. It started off seeming like something I'd be really into, making a point about racism and eugenics and "purity", and maybe a comparison of race to the difference of this parasitic species that lives off of humans...but kind of in the end it seemed like an excuse for a white guy to write the n-word a whole bunch of times? I was interested in a few of the characters but I was asking "why?" a lot and never really got an answer. ( )

This book was advertised to me as a modern take on Lovecraft-style horror. It ended up being a bit more monster-of-the-week than the cosmic horror I expected, but otherwise, this is definitely Lovecraft inspired. There are mad doctors with mad plans, weird hill people with experience of the supernatural, creepy cults with an eye towards monsterish rituals and bloodshed, bizarre and terrifying creatures, and a whole lot of religious hallucinations.

Starts out slow, but speeds up as it progresses, and ends up being a wild ride. A few scenes in here genuinely made me feel really squeamish, particularly a couple very intimate descriptions of surgery and monster births. And there’s a whole lot of nasty to be found on these pages--racism, rape, murder, surgery, plague, and a whole lot of gynecology. Otherwise, it’s a pretty straight forward horror piece. Fans of the genre won’t be disappointed, but also probably won’t ever be terribly surprised.

There’s also a pretty silly romance subplot in here, but other than a few too many ‘Oh my poor darling’ type comments, it doesn’t get in the way of scares. And there’s also a surprising amount of racial tension, which is managed well and merges into the horror narrative well.

This is good genre fiction. It’s weird, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s dark as hell. ( )