Reviews tagging 'Body horror'

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

80 reviews

kellan_writes's review against another edition

dark hopeful 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

4.0

It's hard to really say much about this book without giving spoilers.  So I will say this, it is a page turner, dark and yet hopeful, and in the end it's the story of a teenaged girl who's not allowed out of the house, not after last time, the man who drinks too much in front of his tv and tries to ignore the gaps in his memories, and a cat who loves to read the bible, and what they do when someone moves into the last empty house on Needless Street.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Blood, and Mental illness

hunkydory's review against another edition

dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

3.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death of parent, Alcohol, Animal cruelty, Gore, Grief, Injury/Injury detail, Suicide, Violence, Animal death, Death, Kidnapping, Medical content, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Murder, and Torture

maverax42's review against another edition

dark emotional 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? It's complicated

5.0

This book keeps you guessing and unsure of what is true and real until the very end. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Death, Suicidal thoughts, Body horror, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Mental illness, Murder, Child death, Confinement, Gaslighting, Blood, Kidnapping, Physical abuse, and Suicide attempt

lana72905's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Holy. Crap. This book is a Rollercoaster of what the hecks and what is going on. It was amazing. I loved this book.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Mental illness, Murder, Child abuse, Death, Alcoholism, Emotional abuse, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Physical abuse

Moderate: Body horror, Torture, Suicide, and Animal cruelty

illtakethenightshiftx's review against another edition

dark emotional medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I’m not sure if I can give a summary of this book without spoiling the whole plot, so I won’t. 

Wow. This was a story I wasn’t expecting. I felt intense sadness experiencing this story and I’m still wrestling with whether I actually enjoyed this book or not. There some “wait…what?!” moments that totally stopped me in my tracks, but, for me, the feeling I felt the most while listening was sadness and varying degrees of hollowness. The story felt a little disjointed at times because of the changing narrator points of view, but it may have also been because I listened to it over the course of a week and a half or so. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Mental illness, and Child abuse

Moderate: Animal cruelty and Confinement

cady_sass's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

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

3.75

This is the first time ever that I’ve read a LOT of other reviews before deciding on my final feelings. I went into this blind, because that seemed to be the recommendation and also my preference with most books anyways. I was expecting horror/thriller/possibly speculative fiction? And I don’t think it’s any of those, which perhaps leads to me feeling a little disappointed. If I had to assign a genre I guess would call it psychological mystery. It’s a very slow build, and there are very few horror or thriller elements here. I guessed the “big twist” about 3 chapters in, but the final reveal I did not expect. 

After reading more reviews from people i follow, it seems like it is widely agreed that going in blind was definitely best, and i agree, and that most of the 5 star reviews I see are upon SECOND read. Which makes a lot of sense. I would probably give this 3.75… it is REALLY hard to talk about this without spoilers. Up until the last few chapters, I had some serious qualms with the representation here and how it could be damaging. I fear that because of the way it’s written, this could be triggering and people would not understand the full story or even finish it, so even though I can retract my claws (pun intended) I think the damage can still be done. I will attempt a second read at some point and see if my feelings change. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement, Injury/Injury detail, Medical trauma, Physical abuse, Ableism, Addiction, Alcohol, Chronic illness, Emotional abuse, Grief, Kidnapping, Medical content, Mental illness, Murder, Suicidal thoughts, Body horror, Child death, Death, Death of parent, Suicide, Animal cruelty, Blood, Self harm, Drug use, Abandonment, Alcoholism, Animal death, Bullying, and Suicide attempt

chelsearae87's review against another edition

dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Alcohol, Death of parent, Death, Abandonment, Animal death, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Drug use, Physical abuse, Self harm, Suicide, Gaslighting, Suicide attempt, Body horror, Child abuse, Kidnapping, Suicidal thoughts, Torture, Blood, Bullying, Child death, Murder, Grief, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Emotional abuse

elle_e_d_light's review against another edition

adventurous 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? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

I really don't know how I felt about this book. I gotta think on it some more. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcoholism, Confinement, Suicide attempt, Body horror, Death, Child abuse, Child death, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Medical content, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Self harm, and Death of parent

kimberwitch's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Strong character development? It's complicated

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Bullying, Child death, Mental illness, Murder, Body horror, Injury/Injury detail, Medical trauma, Suicidal thoughts, Child abuse, Confinement, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Grief, Suicide, and Toxic relationship

emwgrace's review against another edition

dark mysterious medium-paced

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

2.5

Trigger/Content Warning for the novel: Extremely Graphic Depictions of Child Abuse

Overhyped and ultimately disappointing. 

I’ve been meaning to read more mystery/thrillers, so I was excited to start this one. At the beginning, I was truly intrigued by both the missing girl case and the main character, Ted, and of course, any book that features a cat will get a special Cat Bonus Star from me. But around the halfway point, something about this made it so slow to get through, and instead of being the page-turner it should have been, I found myself more often just setting it down. This novel also made me uncomfortable (not in a good way) with how it handled certain topics, and because of that, any positive experiences I had while reading have been tainted. 

**Spoilers for the rest of the review**

Nothing ruins a book faster for me than using mental disorders as plot twists. It’s cheap and in almost all cases, poorly done. Yes, I read the author’s Afterword about the research she did and her intentions to destigmatize how DID is treated in media. But after finishing it, I can’t help but feel that the way this condition was handled in this book fed exactly into that stigma. While it was obvious for anyone who’s somewhat familiar with the genre to tell quite early on that Ted was not the culprit—that would have been too easy—the story still points all of its fingers at him from the beginning and spends more than 80% of the narrative treating him like an abusive monster who kidnapped a girl and locks her in a freezer. Revealing at the end of a novel, marketed as horror, that the character who’s been villainized by other characters and treated as an outcast to be feared for nearly the entire book has DID from abuse he experienced as a child, in my opinion, is not revolutionary. You can’t subvert the way mental illness is depicted in fiction if you spend almost 300 pages reproducing the same harmful portrayals you’re trying to subvert.

I know not everyone will agree, but I also know I’m not alone in my views.

In the end, the book wasn't scary, it was just sad and made me feel kinda gross. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Child abuse, and Child death

Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Animal death, Mental illness, Self harm, and Ableism

Minor: Kidnapping, Murder, and Stalking