Gothic, messy, and transgressive: a review Wretch

It's hard to articulate what this book is about. Some horror novels go off the rails when the author can't find a way to wrap things up. This one starts off the rails before slowly pulling itself together, or at least trying to. I'm not sure it succeeds. There isn't much method to the madness. All the book really manages to do is be scary, which I guess is all I can really ask for in a horror novel.

Things open with a grief group that tries to find hidden messages from loved ones through photography, a lot of bizarre epistolary content, a nightmarish entity named Porcelain Khaw, and a severely depressed man named Simeon Link at the center of it all. What follows is dark, intriguing, unusual, and reflective, touching on themes of grief, family, and queerness. If you're the kind of person who is captivated by questions about memory and reality, then you might get a lot out of the horror elements.

Be prepared for the text to linger on the internal musings of deeply troubled people who sometimes confuse their edginess for profundity. Also be prepared for the prose to be a bit inconsistent and repetitive. As someone who cares a lot about prose, I find myself disappointed, but I know this kind of thing is super subjective, so I do still recommend this one if you're interested in a strange mesh of Clive Barker and Franz Kafka.