Reviews with content warning for Body horror - You Feel It Just Below the Ribs

Everything is irrelevant.
Everything is important.
Everything is important, until it is irrelevant.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Until you cannot.
Memory is malleable. History is mutable. All I can do is try to make sure my story isn’t lost. I have saved what I can, so you will understand what we have become.

Content Warnings

dylex's review against another edition

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dark reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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librarymouse's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional reflective fast-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

I've found that I love the niche of nonfiction/memoirs written about a fictional world and fictional people. I really loved this book. Cranor and Matthewson have a talent for describing a character's descent into into madness/paranoia/a conspiracy as a reasonable, understandable, and extended progression. They way they build suspense is very much like the frog and boiling water metaphor, and they pull you right alongside the characters. Miriam feels like a friend, and I desperately want more information about the world.

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andromedial's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? No

4.0

This was a really interesting, creepy look into things that could happen behind closed doors at a government scale. It really picked up towards the end, but the end was a little predictable. The way it was written made it up for it, though, I thought, and it was a really cool idea to have the footnotes questioning the author of the manuscript, and making her seem unreliable. It was also pretty disturbing at one point and made me a lil queasy

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cheye13's review against another edition

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dark mysterious 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

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itacuz's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I’m always curious when reading a book that sprang from a podcast if those who didn’t listen will get the same enjoyment out of the book. I can’t imagine there would be any hurdles reading You Feel It Just Below the Ribs. For me it only brought more questions for the podcast, Within the Wires, and very little prior knowledge helped my understanding of the world until the end. The New Society, the name for the world government within this fictional universe, is necessarily vague in its intentions, in the information it chooses to share. Throughout the novel there is editorializing by a mysterious publisher of the memoir, in her interjections you get a better idea of what is and isn’t allowed to be known. It reads like a dystopian novel edited from the perspective of a propagandist, or someone publishing with propaganda and censorship in mind. There were times I wish I had the physical book in front of me so I could see how something was written on the page. Moments like “edited for clarity” or “original pages suffered water damage” that made me wonder if that was reflected in more than just words. I’m still glad I chose to listen to the audio book. It was like reading an extended season of Within the Wires, much closer to the scope of storytelling their world deserves than the sometimes too short runs on the podcast.

Opening on an explanation of how the autobiography was found, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is almost as interesting in its minor editorializations, making up about five percent, as the narrative story being told. The narrator and subject of the novel is named Miriam, and her life is certainly interesting, if a little too relevant to be reading in the year 2021. A life of civil unrest, global war, and mysterious illness were not what I was in the mood for, but in order to remake the world, Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson had to first destroy it. It takes about half the novel and avoids living in the large scale ugliness, opting instead to describe a childhood political prison or commune slowly turned cult by radical outsiders. I enjoyed the earlier sections as I would any post-apocalyptic story; since the world being described is so similar to ours, I need it to say something interesting soon. I recognized where the world was headed from the podcast, if you’re hesitant though interested, get past the commune and judge from there.

When the civil unrest ends and the world begins to remake itself, Miriam takes techniques she learned in these worst of global situations to remap the mind. A technique called the “Watercolor Quiet”. The New Society takes on an anti-national bent, judging nations to be the fault of all the world’s problems. This leads to the concept of families being at fault for all the national issues, and using the Watercolor Quiet, are erased from civilization. This is when Kirsten Potter’s narration really came alive for me. I was impressed by her ability to switch between characters as Miriam reflecting on her life’s story and imbuing judgement when reading as herself in her modern day. I couldn’t tell if Potter was playing a fictional voice actor hired to read the manuscript for the editor Adepero Oduye’s character was publishing, or if she was reading as Miriam herself. The emotion in Potter’s voice while oscillating between experiences happening in the past and in the moment made the book feel alive. The rest of the story builds on lore that’s been fed into the podcast over time, but it goes to some really dark places by the end. I would not advise for those turned off by sometimes gruesome body horror, though all of it felt earned and vague as possible while still imparting the severity of certain character’s acts.

Oduye serves as an excellent fictional editor, though the writing of her position truly shines in the end. The final epilogue does so much for the entire novel and reads like some of the other greats within this genre. I don’t want to make any direct comparisons because I’d worry it would give everything away when the pacing is so well executed. From the voice acting acting to Cranor and Matthewson’s writing, everything about this book pulls off a spectacular story I couldn’t stop playing. I don’t want to live in the New Society, but this book confirms that any opportunity to unravel more of its lore is an invitation to gripping and well executed storytelling.

Content Warnings

chicafrom3's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A tie-in to the podcast Within The Wires, unfolding the backstory of the Society through the autobiography of a woman who helped create some of the techniques that it was founded on.

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