One Disturbing Book
I don’t have any pictures of southern boardwalks, this one is in PA. It’s every bit as, uh…okay, we both nearly fell in the swamp several times trying to cross this thing.
This week’s book made me think of it.
Review: Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales by Lee Rozelle
I’m going to preface this by saying that Rozelle is a really good writer.
Then I’m going to add the content warnings: Tooth-related body horror, genital-related body horror, and the dog dies. More than once.
This is a pretty extreme book. It’s 12 longer linked stories that are SF body horror, tied together into something that it’s probably for the best that Rozelle doesn’t try to turn into a fix up novel. As in, it works better as it is.
There are fish, and nanotoxins, and experiments that seem focused on…getting rid of men. Which was ultimately my real problem. I really could have done without orthodontic horror…for personal reasons… And while Rozelle also says he’s going into watershed destruction, the fact that this appears to have been written by a straight, cisgender guy gives it a bit of a feeling of “Scared of the woke feminists.”
At the same time, he’s very much into environmental horror, so maybe he wasn’t aiming for that. Either way, if you are into extreme body horror that includes teeth (I’m not) and penises (Slightly less disturbing), this is worth a read. This is one of those works that I think would have read very differently from a different demographic of author, which probably says something disturbing too. But without knowing him, I can’t quite escape the “and you know what the real horror is: feminists” vibe I get. I hope I’m wrong.
While looking up Rozelle, I found his Rate My Professor page. Oh boy…I won’t go into it, but I would either love his class or walk out and never come back.
Unfortunately, I think it’s likely to be the latter, but you can’t deny the man has talent.