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twilliamson 's review for:
Breathe In, Bleed Out
by Brian McAuley
funny
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Disclosure Statement: I received a copy of this novel from the author. My thoughts and opinions of it have not been influenced in any way by either author or publisher.
Brian McAuley is the rising king of slashers. There's a growing market for slasher horror, and writers like Stephen Graham Jones and Philip Fracassi continue to try to find new ways to make slashers fun or relevant, but Brian's work in the subgenre feels less like novelty and more like refinement. Each of his slashers keeps a tight focus on character, then broadens out to incorporate thoughtful themes reflecting on the tensions of human life. What makes his stories work is that every book is ostensibly about something bigger than just killing off a bunch of coeds or teenagers, whether it be about holiday nostalgia and togetherness or growing old and facing a world that changes around you, or in the case of Breathe In, Bleed Out, coping through trauma and guilt.
The book has a lot of fun elements to unpack, but chief among them is its send-up of "wellness culture," which further incorporates elements of criticism specifically on cultural appropriation and toxicity in white culture. Although this isn't a deep treatise on the culture, the book plays around with fresh corpses while maintaining a healthy side-eye at the trappings it criticizes.
But at its core, this is really about about guilt and about how we deal with it in the long run. It's about surviving not just traumatic experiences, but also surviving the way we talk to ourselves about that very survival. It has a lot of fun (and funny) sequences of ironic murder, but at its core it never forgets that the characters of the book need to feel like people, complicated and sometimes even hypocritical, but always flawed in ways good and bad.
With an afterword that makes an impassioned plea for more slasher fiction, Breathe In, Bleed Out feels like a true treatise on the subgenre. It is representative of all the major tropes and twists, but it's digging deep into what makes these stories so fun and what keeps them relevant to our modern cultural conversation. This is a bloody great book and I had a lot of fun with it.
Brian McAuley is the rising king of slashers. There's a growing market for slasher horror, and writers like Stephen Graham Jones and Philip Fracassi continue to try to find new ways to make slashers fun or relevant, but Brian's work in the subgenre feels less like novelty and more like refinement. Each of his slashers keeps a tight focus on character, then broadens out to incorporate thoughtful themes reflecting on the tensions of human life. What makes his stories work is that every book is ostensibly about something bigger than just killing off a bunch of coeds or teenagers, whether it be about holiday nostalgia and togetherness or growing old and facing a world that changes around you, or in the case of Breathe In, Bleed Out, coping through trauma and guilt.
The book has a lot of fun elements to unpack, but chief among them is its send-up of "wellness culture," which further incorporates elements of criticism specifically on cultural appropriation and toxicity in white culture. Although this isn't a deep treatise on the culture, the book plays around with fresh corpses while maintaining a healthy side-eye at the trappings it criticizes.
But at its core, this is really about about guilt and about how we deal with it in the long run. It's about surviving not just traumatic experiences, but also surviving the way we talk to ourselves about that very survival. It has a lot of fun (and funny) sequences of ironic murder, but at its core it never forgets that the characters of the book need to feel like people, complicated and sometimes even hypocritical, but always flawed in ways good and bad.
With an afterword that makes an impassioned plea for more slasher fiction, Breathe In, Bleed Out feels like a true treatise on the subgenre. It is representative of all the major tropes and twists, but it's digging deep into what makes these stories so fun and what keeps them relevant to our modern cultural conversation. This is a bloody great book and I had a lot of fun with it.