Deviants is a novel about three generations of gay men in India and the ways in which people are shaped by the time they live. Vivaan is a gay teenager in India’s Silicon Plateau, and whilst his parents are supportive, they don’t know about the online life he leads, in which sex and love aren’t simple. His uncle Mambro’s experience of being gay is very different, having grown up during a period when a colonial-era law prosecuting homosexuality was constantly being wielded, even as people in India fought to repeal it. And Mambro’s uncle, Sukumar, was born in a time when he had no option, and his love for another man must be hidden, as he struggled to find a place for himself without hurting others.
This is a cleverly structured novel that is very powerful, with each chapter moving between the three stories and each narrative told with a different voice. Through this structure, it is easy to become immersed in all three stories and their connections and differences, which isn’t always possible with a novel telling three parallel stories. Vivaan’s voice notes are confessional, whereas Mambro’s story is at a second-person remove, and Sukumar’s is told in third person narration, and al of these suit the characters and their stories as well as serving to make them distinctive from each other. The three characters struggle with many of the same things, but also specific issues to their time, and particularly Vivaan’s story takes a more futuristic approach to what intimacy might mean in new ways, that offer opportunity and peril.
Deviants is sad and humorous at once, balancing the three characters well to create a powerful exploration of being gay in India over the past decades.
Disappoint Me is a novel about relationships and growing up, as a thirty year old trans woman meets a new guy and navigates a more heteronormative life. Max works as a lawyer for a tech company, doing what their AI tool actually can’t, and after a New Year’s party ends with her falling down some stairs, she’s looking for more stability. She meets Vincent, a corporate lawyer who is sweet and caring, even if a lot of his life feels unlike Max’s. Looming is Max’s friend’s wedding, in which she’s a bridesmaid, but a health scare and a secret from Vincent’s past push that to the background, and Max must face up to what her future might actually hold.
Having loved Bellies, I was excited to read Dinan’s next book, and Disappoint Me has a lot of similarities, focusing on characters’ emotions and relationships, and navigating acting in ways that are or aren’t see as ‘normal’. In her second novel, Dinan focuses on ideas of where to go next, what happens after. The protagonist, Max, is thirty and watches as people suddenly start focusing on weddings and babies, or being obsessed with their jobs as an alternative. The book considers what kind of future there might be, especially for a heterosexual trans woman whose job doesn’t challenge her and whose future as a poet didn’t seem to go anywhere. There’s a sense of trying out a heteronormative life, with some hilarious touches like that her boyfriend Vincent loves bringing up that he’s read Detransition, Baby whenever talk turns to parenting, and this novel in general does feel like it follows on not only from Dinan’s debut but other talked-about trans literary fiction like Detransition, Baby, exploring a world in which cis straight people have also read these novels.
Given the title, I did start fearing partway through that Disappoint Me‘s ending was going to be too bleak, but actually it is more ambivalent and purposefully ambiguous, showing the difficulty in seeing anything as an ending when the world always keeps going regardless. There’s a lot of things that are thrown up in the novel and don’t really get resolved, but again, as the book is trying to capture the fact that life keeps going on, and what that means when you’re trying to work out your own life, this feels purposeful. The characters are messy, but as the ending tries to highlight, people aren’t perfect and you can still love people when they mess up, and part of getting older is realising this.
Blob is a novel about a woman who meets a blob in an alley and tries to turn it into a perfect man. Vi has dropped out of college, is still dealing with her last breakup, and works at the reception in a local hotel, where she tries to avoid talking to her friendly co-worker, Rachel. When she finally gives in to Rachel and goes out with her to a drag club, Vi finds a blob in an alley. Intrigued, she takes it home, where it eats cereal and watches TV, and soon Vi realises she can shape the blob as she wants, so she tells the blob to become an attractive man. However, even the blob resists Vi’s control, and she has to face the fact she might have to stop running away from everything.
The blob concept is such a fun one for a novel and I love weird novels like this, exploring a character’s constant fucking things up through the lens of something strange. Vi feels like a outsider everywhere and protects herself by ruining things or avoiding what she really wants, and the blob appears as an easy way out, until she realises that it isn’t, because the blob becomes Bob, who has autonomy and doesn’t want to do what she does. It’s like using Frankenstein as a chance to realise you have to actually take control of your life and be better to other people, rather than not putting the work in with them. The narrative does actually give Vi a chance to change, and it’s a charming take on a coming of age story.
Natural Beauty is a novel about the luxury beauty industry, being an outsider, and what it means to make something beautiful. The protagonist was a promising piano player, studying at the Conservatory to the delight of her parents who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, until an accident left them in a medical facility and her unable to play. When she is offered a job at Holistik, a beauty company that offers cutting-edge treatments for a high price, it is an opportunity not only to pay her parents’ medical bills, but to gain access to the world she couldn’t join through piano playing. As she becomes entranced by a new friend and her body starts to change thanks to Holistik’s products, she starts to realise that there’s a price being paid for what Holistik and its sister companies are doing.
This book is a combination of body horror and literary fiction with dystopian thriller elements, using this to explore the wellness and beauty industry as a concept, ideas of perfection in beauty and art, and personal experiences of immigration and race. It’s both satirical and not, as good body horror often is, and there’s a lot of little details that aren’t as explored as the main narrative, but are fascinating too (like the owner of the company also making money from a body modification business because alongside the ‘culture’ of beauty and wellness there’s always a ‘counter-culture’).
The unnamed protagonist tumbles down the rabbit hole whilst the reader is faced with knowing it isn’t going to go well, seeing the warning signs she misses. Her story highlights how the beauty industry often preys on people who need solutions to other problems in their lives, but also how when someone is desperate it is easy to not see things that don’t seem quite right. The parts of the book in which she’s thinking about music and the need for dissonance and harshness were some of my favourite parts, and beyond the obvious parallel with beauty, it also shines a light on ideas of who plays music and what they should look and seem like.
Natural Beauty is a gripping descent into a dystopian world of body horror. You can really picture it being adapted into a film that would sit well alongside a lot of recent films, not just in terms of the concept but in the fluid, hazy way it unfolds.
The Resurrectionist is a historical novel about a young medical student who arrives in Edinburgh, meets an intriguing dissection assistant, and falls into the world of stealing corpses for use in medical schools. James arrives in Edinburgh to pursue his dream of attending medical school, having escaped his family’s expectations for him but lacking money after this father’s death. When he strikes a deal to attend a private anatomy school with Nye, the assistant, James finds himself drawn into an underground world of supplying dead bodies for medical schools, treading the line between scientific progress and crime, but alongside the thrill of the danger is another thrill, as James finds himself with feelings for Nye.
I tend to be selective with the historical novels I read, but this one looked interesting for the queer love story and the gruesome premise. The former element is definitely prevalent in the book, though it feels more like a young adult book in the way this is treated with vague references to what James and Nye do together. There’s a slight level of peril due to the time period and legal and social ramifications of gay relationships, but it always seems to be kept as something that’s a vague annoyance to James rather than the danger it has previously placed Nye in, which again makes it feel like a young adult novel that doesn’t quite want to delve into how it would feel to exist like that. Not that this is a bad thing, as people often want to read historical novels that aren’t just about queer misery, but in this case it is meant to be a threat, just not one that is explored.
The gruesome element isn’t really all that dark, as this book is more of a gothic-atmosphere historical novel than anything particularly scary or gritty. There’s a bit of stuff about university medical education vs practical anatomy and dissection, but otherwise the medical student is really just the background, and James’ student friends are there as plot devices as needed. Again, this works for the book as it has a simple narrative, but it never really delves more deeply into anything, being quite coy about a lot of elements (like one of two female characters, a young woman who helps out Nye and the diggers, but we never quite see what her seemingly disreputable existence actually is). There’s a lot about class, wealth, and power in the book that again isn’t really explored, and particularly the ending is very neat, ignoring these things for a happy ending that seems to set up for a potential sequel.
This is a fun book if you like light queer romance with a gothic premise, though I think the style and narrative mean it would be better suited marketed as young adult fiction (and I can think of young adult books that do delve more into the kind of material this one avoids). I enjoyed reading it, but I found the ending too easily resolved and without much emotional power, because everything seemed too easy for them. I think there will be a lot of fans of this book who enjoy the romance and the vibes, but on reflection, it wasn’t entirely for me.
At Dark, I Become Loathsome is a new short novel from LaRocca about a hopeless man who has invented an unusual ritual for people who want to die, but also want to live a better life. Ashley Lutin has lost his wife and his son has disappeared, he struggles with the knowledge of his queerness and the queerness he saw in his son, and he’s positioned himself as an outsider who can be contacted by strangers for a strange ritual that, unbeknownst to them, involves being buried alive. However, one of these strangers tested Ashley’s carefully planned ritual and his ideas of salvation.
I’ve read a lot of Eric LaRocca’s books, and I tend to find his stories either work for me or they don’t. This one is in the former category, with a good mix of some LaRocca trademarks (weird online forums, depraved actions, grim violence) and a self-aggrandising protagonist who believes he can really change people’s lives. The writing style and layers to this book, with constant repetition of the title phrase and some stories-within-stories as internet posts, are likely to divide people, but I enjoyed how the book was almost self-obsessed with its own rituals and motifs, reflecting Ashley’s ideas and how he uses these as a way to deal with his grief and regret. Ashley’s own belief in his edginess and outsider reputation (particularly through his claiming that having face piercings makes him really weird) is also an interesting aspect and again reflects the title of the book and the certainty of the protagonist that he is loathsome.
As a fan of Dennis Cooper and books like Exquisite Corpse and Brainwyrms, I didn’t find the content particularly shocking, and it all centres around our ideas of death and life so thematically makes sense. I did think that, though I liked the almost novella length (and think LaRocca writes that kind of length well), a few of the plot elements could’ve had more depth to them, particularly the backstory of Ashley’s child, Bailey, and their relationship. Ashley’s own queerness and his reaction to Bailey’s felt like something that needed more space to really make the queer horror element of this book work. However, this is one of my favourite Eric LaRocca stories I’ve read, combining a good concept with a narrative written through a distinctive perspective, and I was glad to enjoy it after not being a big fan of Everything The Darkness Eats.
Sick Houses is an exploration of unnerving and haunted domestic buildings, from simple family homes to imposing concrete tower blocks, and the fiction and real life that shows us these. The chapters focus on different types of architecture and spooky homes, sharing a range of examples and some of the eerie elements of these, and drawing on a range of media to look into what makes a house haunted.
I like Taylor’s approach to the idea of haunted houses, making it quite a broad term that doesn’t just cover houses with ghosts, but a range of types of ‘haunting’. There’s a lot of different material covered in the book, with a lot of examples, but I did find that it was more of a collection of different kinds of haunted homes rather than an analysis of things about them. I expected it to have more of an argument than it did, though I did like that the final chapter was Taylor’s own experiences and a sense of uncertainty around what exactly a haunting is. I’d say that it is good if you’re looking for something that shares a lot of different types of ‘sick houses’, but it is worth knowing that it isn’t an in-depth exploration of the concept of these houses and what it might mean. I think it would sit well alongside Jacob Geller’s YouTube video ‘Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House’, which takes the approach of analysing a few haunted houses more deeply, as for me that video set the bar very high for looking at the concept of a haunted house.
Bat Eater is a novel about Asian women being killed, and one crime-scene cleaner trying to deal with the death of her sister. It’s months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, and not long ago, her sister was pushed in front of a subway train from beside her. She’s isolated from everyone, including her co-workers who also scrub blood away from the crime scenes of endless women in Chinatown, her Chinese aunt who wants her to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, and her White aunt who wants her to be a good church-going American. When a shadow seems be lurking around her, Cora starts to realise she cannot ignore what is going on.
I didn’t know what to expect from this book going in, but it turned out to be a gripping horror novel that explores the pandemic, racism, corruption, mental health, and lurking ghosts. The novel opens with the shocking death of Cora’s sister, really setting the tone for the gory, no-holds-barred story to come, full of horrible deaths and a protagonist struggling with not only grief and trauma, but also the impact of COVID-19 on her mental health as she compulsively cleans and fears contamination. The book is often heartbreaking and horrifying, but as Kylie Lee Baker’s author’s note says at the end, it also has moments of humour and comfort, particularly as Cora finds herself becoming friends with the co-workers she wanted to keep at arms’ length.
Bat Eater is a memorable take on a COVID-19 novel, twisting the serial killer genre into something filled with emotion and the horrors of both the physical and ghost world, exploring anti-Asian racism in America at the start of the pandemic. Straddling horror and thriller boundaries with ghost and serial killer elements, it is perfect for anyone who likes hard-hitting, gory fiction that doesn’t shy away from exposing the horrors of the world.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes is a horror novel about an apocalypse brought about by right-wing news and social media in the USA. Noah’s parents have been parroting far-right views for a while now, but when his mother leaves a cryptic message and then can’t be contacted, he drives from Brooklyn to Virginia to check on them, but what he finds is his parents in a weird state, trying to attack him. Then it turns out they aren’t the only ones, and Noah’s brother and his family have fallen victim too, and then Noah and his nephew must try and make it back to Brooklyn, through the radicalised hordes.
I’ve been hearing about this novel for a while, and even though I didn’t really enjoy the only other Clay McLeod Chapman book I’ve read, I wanted to give this one a go, and I’m glad I did. The satire in this is very explicit—there’s Fax News, there’s influencer juice cleanses, there’s Baby Ghost to the tune of Baby Shark—and the horror is too, with memorable moments of gore and sex. This isn’t for the faint-hearted, and a good recent comparison is Alison Rumfitt’s work: if you enjoy that, you’ll be able to handle the stuff in this, with Tell Me I’m Worthless cited at the end in a list of influences and useful works for writing the book. I enjoyed that it was more extreme, not shying away from ideas of possession and what horrible things that makes people do to their bodies.
The structure is more experimental than most apocalypse stories, focusing mostly on the initial moment in the first part, then the build up in the second, and then just after that initial moment in the final section, which is intercut with lots of found footage moments to give a sense of the scale of devastation. This format doesn’t give much space for connection with the central figure, Noah, but you delve further into the minds of his brother Asher and Asher’s family, and it’s not the sort of horror where you need a deep connection as it is more about the shock of what is happening more generally than specifically what is happening to Noah. The ending doesn’t give much closure or explanation, and perhaps lacks a really memorable closing moment, but it also plays on a ‘liberal’ idea that such an apocalypse could be easily recovered from, suggesting that far-right threats aren’t just something to ignore.
I really like horror that blends together modern fears with classic horror elements like possession, and Wake Up and Open Your Eyes feels like an American version of Alison Rumfitt’s work, exploring the visceral horror of media radicalisation and far-right views. The middle section, about how one family got to that point, was perhaps the strongest part for me, especially in light of this theme, but overall this is a great horror novel that doesn’t shy away from being in your face, and you just can’t shut your eyes.
Usually about this time, I start listing all the books I gave 5 stars to, sorted into categories like ‘fiction’ or ‘poetry’ and trying to split out books that were released that year or not. This year, inspired by Kat’s great musing on reading pre-2004 books, I’m going to be a bit less list focused, and just talk about my reading in general and my recommendations out of that.
I didn’t have any reading goals going into 2024. For the past few years I’ve stopped trying to read a certain number of books, which is nice. I ended up very busy at work and often too tired to read more than a few pages before sleeping, so it was less stressful to not care about racking up more books. My aim was just to keep my Netgalley ‘to read’ books manageable and try to get through a range of other books. I actually did read either 194 or 195 books in 2024 (depending on whether I finish Peter Straub’s Ghost Story today or not), which is a huge number but less than I’ve read in a year since 2018. Is that something I should be able to find out? That’s a separate rant about the datafication of hobbies.
I end up with such a long list of books I want to read that when I do finally get to read them and they’re good, it’s like an extra treat. This year, I read a bunch of books I’d been wanting to read for a while which lived up to my waiting, like Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom, Little Blue Encylopedia (for Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante, Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas, and These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever. The latter two really hit the terrible part of me that wishes I could go back and read The Secret History for the first time again.
Looking back, I enjoyed a lot of new 2024 (and upcoming in 2025) fiction, but not to a level where I really loved it. However, there are a few notable exceptions to that: Katherine Packert Burke’s Still Life was a great exploration of writing trans autofiction; Model Home by Rivers Solomon was rich and haunting; and Santanu Bhattacharya’s Deviants (coming out in 2025) tells a three-generation story of being gay in a way that sold me on a structure (three concurrent narratives of generations) I usually don’t like. There was a lot of great poetry too, but for some reason I’m much worse at summarising what I like about poetry so I’m just going to say that Them! by Harry Josephine Giles in both printed and audiobook format was wonderful and transformative. I didn’t read many technology books this year, but Supremacy by Parmy Olson is my current recommendation for getting a sense of the race that led to generative AI products and where the money, power, and decisions came and continue to come from.
And finally, inspired by Kat’s discussion of reading older books, I really need to read more older books again (that aren’t just Dennis Cooper, who I seem to continue reading every year—this year I enjoyed The Sluts and its playful form). I did tackle The Godfather and loved it, reminding myself how fun it is to read a long book in physical form for a sense of achievement. Amongst others, I also read more Shirley Jackson, Poor Things, some haiku in translation, Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the first couple of volumes of Death Note, and Queer before going to see the film, so I think my pre-2005 reading has a few distinct strands.
Storygraph’s stats just told me that I’ve not reread anything this year (if you discount the two different formats of Them!) so I think I also need to resolve to reread some books (The Haunting of Hill House, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Ada or Ardor, and Detransition, Baby are all on my reread radar currently). My physical to-read pile threatens to topple and crush my sleeping head, so I really should read more of those, too. I’ll return this time next year and we’ll see how I did (in the meantime, you’re welcome to find me on Goodreads or Storygraph to spy on what I read).
The author as apprehensive, next to the towering to-read pile on the last day of 2024.
Fiendfully Reading 
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