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bjswann's review against another edition
5.0
The most beautiful book you will ever read about people being murdered with feces.
Dread in the Breast introduces readers to the many incarnations of the goddess of filth, and takes them on a mind-bending journey from the sewers of Rome to a cosmic toilet beyond mortal comprehension. Jacob’s narrative jumps back and forth in both time and space, from nightmare visions of contemporary America to Afghanistan, the Aztec empire, and medieval France. Other times, Jacob takes us to netherworlds of sublime and hallucinatory horror that rival in their strangeness and intensity the freakiest Otherworlds of any conceivable genre, whether visual or literary. All of these places are imbued with idiosyncratic details that make them feel authentic, and Jacob’s own invented mythos is woven almost seamlessly into real-world culture, history and religion, creating a dark alter-Earth that is at once alien and eerily familiar.
Dread in the Beast is in many ways a sublime effort. Jacob clearly hates writing boring sentences. Her prose is almost never simply functional; she’s always trying to blow the reader’s mind with some new linguistic novelty. Sometimes she gambles and loses, but mostly she wins, producing kaleidoscopic passages resembling some vivid and terrible acid trip transmuted into language.
Though mostly grim in tone, Dread in the Beast has some moments of pitch black humor that will probably have you laughing out loud, and there are enough gruesome vignettes on offer here to satisfy even the most jaded splatter fan. Though the book sometimes seems diffuse and meandering during its long build-up, it features an explosive and multi-layered finale that more than delivers on each and every one of its terrible promises. Fans of literary horror shall not be disappointed!
Dread in the Breast introduces readers to the many incarnations of the goddess of filth, and takes them on a mind-bending journey from the sewers of Rome to a cosmic toilet beyond mortal comprehension. Jacob’s narrative jumps back and forth in both time and space, from nightmare visions of contemporary America to Afghanistan, the Aztec empire, and medieval France. Other times, Jacob takes us to netherworlds of sublime and hallucinatory horror that rival in their strangeness and intensity the freakiest Otherworlds of any conceivable genre, whether visual or literary. All of these places are imbued with idiosyncratic details that make them feel authentic, and Jacob’s own invented mythos is woven almost seamlessly into real-world culture, history and religion, creating a dark alter-Earth that is at once alien and eerily familiar.
Dread in the Beast is in many ways a sublime effort. Jacob clearly hates writing boring sentences. Her prose is almost never simply functional; she’s always trying to blow the reader’s mind with some new linguistic novelty. Sometimes she gambles and loses, but mostly she wins, producing kaleidoscopic passages resembling some vivid and terrible acid trip transmuted into language.
Though mostly grim in tone, Dread in the Beast has some moments of pitch black humor that will probably have you laughing out loud, and there are enough gruesome vignettes on offer here to satisfy even the most jaded splatter fan. Though the book sometimes seems diffuse and meandering during its long build-up, it features an explosive and multi-layered finale that more than delivers on each and every one of its terrible promises. Fans of literary horror shall not be disappointed!
bmartino's review
3.0
Not for the faint of heart. Brutal, graphic, downright gross. Recommend not eating while reading many portions.
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