I won’t spend a lot of time reviewing any book to which I give less than a workaday 3 rating: the “score” is more a reflection of my own taste than quality. Joe Koch is a non-binary, queer author who specializes in horror. There’s lots of eviscera and genitals and blood and semen and teeth and goo in this collection of short stories, and other reviewers have noted the queer subversions Koch writes. At times I think I understood some of the brilliance that others are seeing; a story about two people locked up and contained in an iron maiden held my interest throughout, and I think I followed the narrative of a mass murderer looking back on the events that may or may not have transpired. But I found most of the stories difficult to follow, and the gore became less interesting over the course of hundreds of pages. I wonder whether this is a book that would be better enjoyed in print (I borrowed an e-copy from the library as my nightstand was temporarily empty) and visited once in a while rather than read in one go. 2/5