Scan barcode
lblackburn04's review
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I overall really enjoyed the book and its general vibe, however it had a few flaws that stopped it being rated higher.
The first half of the book is super slow and I nearly gave up on it; I’m glad I didn’t because the 2nd half was super captivating.
I did find the random street races off putting and out of place, and I felt as though the book could have benefitted from less of those and an extended ending.
The first half of the book is super slow and I nearly gave up on it; I’m glad I didn’t because the 2nd half was super captivating.
I did find the random street races off putting and out of place, and I felt as though the book could have benefitted from less of those and an extended ending.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Suicide, and Sexual content
Minor: Homophobia, Transphobia, and Racism
dodgeremerson's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Toxic relationship, Vomit, Body horror, Sexual content, Toxic friendship, Death, Self harm, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Panic attacks/disorders, Suicide, Alcohol, Gore, Suicidal thoughts, Violence, Blood, Confinement, and Murder
Moderate: Homophobia, Cursing, Medical content, Physical abuse, Classism, Addiction, Alcoholism, Death of parent, Drug use, and Drug abuse
Minor: Religious bigotry, Car accident, Transphobia, and Death of parent
maytmayorga's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence
Moderate: Blood and Transphobia
kers_tin's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Murder, Torture, Alcohol, Confinement, Drug use, Injury/Injury detail, and Suicide
Moderate: Racism and Homophobia
Minor: Slavery and Transphobia
khea's review
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Alcohol, Drug use, Blood, Death, Gore, Grief, Homophobia, Murder, Sexual content, and Violence
Moderate: Racism, Religious bigotry, Suicidal thoughts, Torture, and Cursing
Minor: Deadnaming, Slavery, Terminal illness, and Transphobia
onehtl1ama's review
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug use, Grief, Alcohol, and Blood
Moderate: Transphobia and Domestic abuse
basementofbooks's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Panic attacks/disorders, Alcohol, Self harm, Violence, Homophobia, Murder, Blood, Drug use, Injury/Injury detail, and Vomit
Minor: Car accident, Colonisation, Transphobia, and Deadnaming
mallorypen's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
This was a good book in so many heartbreaking ways. Though it took me a little time to get into it, once the story was underway I was hooked.
This is self-aware Southern Gothic at its finest; the horror elements felt folkloric, and the racism and classicism played an important role in the way the story developed.
The overwhelming part of reading this book - especially with such a good narrator - is the grief. This would not be a comforting read for those dealing with loss, as the ghoul both is and isn’t Eddie. The parody of affection is wrenching, as is Andrew’s slow realization that he and Eddie had been in love but too scared/repressed/unaware to act on it.
I don’t think I understand why Eddie kept Andrew at arm’s length when he moved to Nashville, except that he wanted to explore something that Andrew did not.
Sam’s character was fantastic in his depth; drug dealer, street racer, but caring cousin and emotionally mature lover. His acceptance at the end, giving Andrew a fresh start … oh, heartbreaking but believable given the trauma they went through.
I did kind of call the professor was the bad guy at the beginning, and the pacing did feel a little slow at the onset. But otherwise, this was a haunting, emotional rollercoaster with some beautiful writing.
This is self-aware Southern Gothic at its finest; the horror elements felt folkloric, and the racism and classicism played an important role in the way the story developed.
The overwhelming part of reading this book - especially with such a good narrator - is the grief. This would not be a comforting read for those dealing with loss, as the ghoul both is and isn’t Eddie. The parody of affection is wrenching, as is Andrew’s slow realization that he and Eddie had been in love but too scared/repressed/unaware to act on it.
I don’t think I understand why Eddie kept Andrew at arm’s length when he moved to Nashville, except that he wanted to explore something that Andrew did not.
Sam’s character was fantastic in his depth; drug dealer, street racer, but caring cousin and emotionally mature lover. His acceptance at the end, giving Andrew a fresh start … oh, heartbreaking but believable given the trauma they went through.
I did kind of call the professor was the bad guy at the beginning, and the pacing did feel a little slow at the onset. But otherwise, this was a haunting, emotional rollercoaster with some beautiful writing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Violence, and Death
Moderate: Suicide, Racism, Transphobia, and Homophobia
nickoliver's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
It took me quite a while to finish this book. I think I was a little bit in a reading slump that exacerbated the slowness with which I read it. But for the most part, it was due to the slow pace and the writing, which was a bit challenging for me as a non-English native speaker sometimes.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first. Especially the first half talked around a lot - the scenes kept repeating, the supernatural was confusing, the plot stagnated, the characters infuriated a bit. It was hard to convince myself to pick up the story again, knowing the main character would slog through life and not really acknowledge the problematic nature of others (mainly Sam for a very long time). And for a while, all that was happening was Sam pressuring Andrew to come out with him, a lot of alcohol and drugs, and car races. However, I have read a review (this one by Chai) where they talked about how this was kind of justified, since it emphasised Andrew's aimlessness and his grief. He’d just lost the most important person in his life and was utterly lost; how was he supposed to care about anything but finding out properly what happened? But still, it didn’t make for an enthusiastic reader.
Thankfully, after a while, things started to come together. While it was fairly predictable where the mystery surrounding Eddie’s death was concerned - the villain was easy to clock as the villain quite early on, to the point where I almost convinced myself it couldn’t be them because that was way too obvious and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to even expect a plot twist-, amusingly enough, I was way more invested and cared for the characters a lot more and suddenly had little trouble turning the pages (for a while at the beginning of the week, I literally read about twenty pages a day; later, that was tripled).
Like I mentioned above, the supernatural elements were a bit confusing. I understood the majority of it, but a lot of the time, I didn’t understand them while they were happening. And some parts I still don’t. It’s like I understood the overall theme of it, but if you asked me details about what exactly happened when Andrew was dealing with the revenant and being shown memories and waking up in deer carcasses or with slit wrists, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to you. That was a bit frustrating at times, since it was a pretty big part of the story.
My favourite thing about the book was the way Andrew grappled with his sexuality. At the beginning of the book, he wasn’t aware that he liked men and that he'd been in love with Eddie. Or rather, he seemed to have suppressed it so hard he wasn’t even aware that’s what he did. But when he went to Nashville to try and find out what happened to Eddie, it turned out that everyone thought he and Eddie had been a couple, and in all the six months he’d been there alone, Eddie’d never bothered to correct anyone. And that opened the dam inside of him - once he was made aware of it, it spilled out of him and he couldn’t put it back.
It was just written about so well! So much about his past explained why he and Eddie never went there, why it went unacknowledged. There was also a character named Del who added an interesting insight into their relationship. She was Andrew’s ex-girlfriend but had also been with Eddie at the same time as well. At one point in the book, she confronted Andrew about it and basically told him that they’d used her as a way to be with each other without having to be upfront about it, and that she thought if Eddie hadn’t died, they would’ve figured it out eventually. Hearing the way she and others talked about them was absolutely painful . It was a case of what-ifs, a whole lot of impossibilities. Andrew’s grief about losing Eddie and simultaneously realising what he’s lost along with him was raw and articulated so devastatingly, it made my insides clench with heartache.
I also appreciated that Eddie wasn’t painted as this perfect boy who would’ve made Andrew happy for the rest of his life if they’d gotten together. There were a lot of things said about him that made me side-eye him a little, which I didn’t like at first, but then I realised I kind of did? He wasn’t the perfect victim that was written about in a almost otherworldly way. I do think they would’ve been together for probably eternity, just because their connection dated so far back, but it wouldn’t have been a picture perfect relationship. I do sometimes feel like I wanted a little bit more of Eddie - maybe some flashbacks that would’ve shown me more of their dynamic, since that was the part that caught me off-guard a little sometimes -, but it didn’t bother me all too much.
There was a little romance between Andrew and another male character, which I really wasn’t on-board at first; this other character had a lot of (implied and shown) racist and homophobic friends, which was something that was never really addressed once the romantic interest was explicitly there. But surprisingly, I did warm up to him. I also liked the way their relationship was built up, because it wasn’t all too obvious from the start that he was going to be a romantic prospect? At least not obvious to me, because he wasn’t really on my radar for that. In any way, he was mostly just a means to an end at first and read as just really bad news, and while the start of their romance was a bit sudden, it didn’t completely come out of the blue. It was just a lot more subtly built up than in other books.
The side characters were fascinating and fleshed-out. There was Riley, Sam’s cousin and Andrew’s roommate, who helped with the latter’s quest for answers and had himself a penchant for the supernatural. He was also trans, and I honestly loved the way Mandelo wrote about that. It was just things like a noticing of top surgery scars, hints that Riley used to have a different name, that he'd shown up on Sam's doorstep with a shaved head. That was it. There was never a big deal made out of anything, no “A-Z of Being Trans”, no Riley explaining himself in big fat letters so that even cis readers will understand what was going on. It was so nonchalantly that I even convinced myself for a short while that I interpreted Riley as trans but that that wasn’t actually what Mandelo implied.
The villain of the story was interesting, because they weren't so obvious at first. At the contrary, the first time they showed up, I even complimented the tactful and kind way they talked to Andrew. Like I mentioned above, it was fairly in-your-face later on, but it wasn’t at first, and they weren’t acting like a villain in an obvious way even later on. You knew they were based on subtle things like the way they treated certain people, and their disgustingly racist family history , not simply based on their actions. They weren't going around using slurs or behaving ugly or reciting obvious villain monologues.
An aspect of the story I really appreciated was the criticism of racism in academia (especially for a book that’s adjacent to dark academia a bit). There was a side character named West who was supposed to mentor Andrew. He’d been at the school for almost seven years and his dissertation kept getting rejected. It was very obvious that it was due to racism, especially once you learnt about Troth’s family and her house being a former plantation home , but you still had Andrew not really grasping that. He never reacted to the few quips West made about it, and Riley fought with him for seemingly no reason (really, even to the end, I’m still not sure why they didn’t get along). And when Andrew suspected him of murdering Eddie, it was always pretty obvious that it wasn’t Eddie West had a problem with but Troth and the way they treated him, but Andrew overlooked that a lot. It was frustrating, but it was also realistic, and honestly, it did stop the story from being a white saviour trope, so that was probably good? After all, at the end of the book, West worked on getting justice himself, he didn't have Andrew or Riley fight his battles for him.
Overall, this was a bit of a challenging trip and a half. The characters were infuriating at times and the book was pretty repetitive and slow for like, at least half of it, but I loved the way it explored internalised homophobia, masculinity, and coming to terms with being too late. It made me feel very raw and emotional at times. Also, while I gave the book 4.5 stars at first, I bumped that up to 5 stars because I literally didn't stop thinking about it for the rest of the entire year (for context, this was the very first book I read in 2023).
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first. Especially the first half talked around a lot - the scenes kept repeating, the supernatural was confusing, the plot stagnated, the characters infuriated a bit. It was hard to convince myself to pick up the story again, knowing the main character would slog through life and not really acknowledge the problematic nature of others (mainly Sam for a very long time). And for a while, all that was happening was Sam pressuring Andrew to come out with him, a lot of alcohol and drugs, and car races. However, I have read a review (this one by Chai) where they talked about how this was kind of justified, since it emphasised Andrew's aimlessness and his grief. He’d just lost the most important person in his life and was utterly lost; how was he supposed to care about anything but finding out properly what happened? But still, it didn’t make for an enthusiastic reader.
Thankfully, after a while, things started to come together. While it was fairly predictable where the mystery surrounding Eddie’s death was concerned - the villain was easy to clock as the villain quite early on, to the point where I almost convinced myself it couldn’t be them because that was way too obvious and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to even expect a plot twist-, amusingly enough, I was way more invested and cared for the characters a lot more and suddenly had little trouble turning the pages (for a while at the beginning of the week, I literally read about twenty pages a day; later, that was tripled).
Like I mentioned above, the supernatural elements were a bit confusing. I understood the majority of it, but a lot of the time, I didn’t understand them while they were happening. And some parts I still don’t. It’s like I understood the overall theme of it, but if you asked me details about what exactly happened when Andrew was dealing with the revenant and being shown memories and waking up in deer carcasses or with slit wrists, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to you. That was a bit frustrating at times, since it was a pretty big part of the story.
My favourite thing about the book was the way Andrew grappled with his sexuality. At the beginning of the book, he wasn’t aware that he liked men and that he'd been in love with Eddie. Or rather, he seemed to have suppressed it so hard he wasn’t even aware that’s what he did. But when he went to Nashville to try and find out what happened to Eddie, it turned out that everyone thought he and Eddie had been a couple, and in all the six months he’d been there alone, Eddie’d never bothered to correct anyone. And that opened the dam inside of him - once he was made aware of it, it spilled out of him and he couldn’t put it back.
It was just written about so well! So much about his past explained why he and Eddie never went there, why it went unacknowledged. There was also a character named Del who added an interesting insight into their relationship. She was Andrew’s ex-girlfriend but had also been with Eddie at the same time as well.
I also appreciated that Eddie wasn’t painted as this perfect boy who would’ve made Andrew happy for the rest of his life if they’d gotten together. There were a lot of things said about him that made me side-eye him a little, which I didn’t like at first, but then I realised I kind of did? He wasn’t the perfect victim that was written about in a almost otherworldly way.
There was a little romance between Andrew and another male character, which I really wasn’t on-board at first; this other character had a lot of (implied and shown) racist and homophobic friends, which was something that was never really addressed once the romantic interest was explicitly there. But surprisingly, I did warm up to him. I also liked the way their relationship was built up, because it wasn’t all too obvious from the start that he was going to be a romantic prospect? At least not obvious to me, because he wasn’t really on my radar for that. In any way, he was mostly just a means to an end at first and read as just really bad news, and while the start of their romance was a bit sudden, it didn’t completely come out of the blue. It was just a lot more subtly built up than in other books.
The side characters were fascinating and fleshed-out. There was Riley, Sam’s cousin and Andrew’s roommate, who helped with the latter’s quest for answers and had himself a penchant for the supernatural. He was also trans, and I honestly loved the way Mandelo wrote about that. It was just things like a noticing of top surgery scars, hints that Riley used to have a different name, that he'd shown up on Sam's doorstep with a shaved head. That was it. There was never a big deal made out of anything, no “A-Z of Being Trans”, no Riley explaining himself in big fat letters so that even cis readers will understand what was going on. It was so nonchalantly that I even convinced myself for a short while that I interpreted Riley as trans but that that wasn’t actually what Mandelo implied.
The villain of the story was interesting, because they weren't so obvious at first. At the contrary, the first time they showed up, I even complimented the tactful and kind way they talked to Andrew. Like I mentioned above, it was fairly in-your-face later on, but it wasn’t at first, and they weren’t acting like a villain in an obvious way even later on. You knew they were based on subtle things like the way they treated certain people, and
An aspect of the story I really appreciated was the criticism of racism in academia (especially for a book that’s adjacent to dark academia a bit). There was a side character named West who was supposed to mentor Andrew. He’d been at the school for almost seven years and his dissertation kept getting rejected. It was very obvious that it was due to racism, especially once you learnt about
Overall, this was a bit of a challenging trip and a half. The characters were infuriating at times and the book was pretty repetitive and slow for like, at least half of it, but I loved the way it explored internalised homophobia, masculinity, and coming to terms with being too late. It made me feel very raw and emotional at times. Also, while I gave the book 4.5 stars at first, I bumped that up to 5 stars because I literally didn't stop thinking about it for the rest of the entire year (for context, this was the very first book I read in 2023).
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcohol, Blood, Death, Racism, Slavery, Drug use, Grief, Homophobia, Murder, Sexual content, Suicide, and Violence
Minor: Transphobia, Death of parent, Car accident, and Child abuse
laguerrelewis's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
This book is oozing in atmosphere. Lee Mandelo has a way of describing things that cuts right to the heart of the image, transporting you into the story. This skill is employed to great effect in this creepy, tragic southern gothic. A story about haunting, inheritance, personhood, and love in all its fucked up forms, this is a great tale to raise the hair on your neck an leave you with a lot to consider.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Racism, Cursing, Kidnapping, Abandonment, Alcohol, Drug abuse, Body horror, Fire/Fire injury, Grief, Blood, Violence, Homophobia, Injury/Injury detail, Vomit, Sexual content, Classism, Gore, Death, Toxic relationship, Drug use, Toxic friendship, and Transphobia