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A review by ghostboyreads
In the End, You Kill Us Both by V. Ivan
4.5
"I envisioned their teeth framed around my gnawed-on wrist, against a mound of pink, pretty tissue, blistering with nodules and pockets of white fat - a sensation I'd supposedly never feel. Snaking jealousy sized my throat and warped my breath."
In the End, You Kill Us Both is surrealist horror at its very finest, at its very best - it's like experiencing the most luscious of nightmares, like a dream that's melting, like memories that are fading away. It's just so, so very weird, in the very best possible way. It's a novel that's all teeth and drool waiting to drag you down into the depths of Hell. In the End, You Kill Us Both is horrendous, foul, and, so damn beautiful - poetic, yet ugly too, destructive, yet healing. What a monstrous novel, an apocalyptic hellscape. Grim, gritty, grimy, coated in filth and rot and ruin, this is a heart-shattering, gut-wrenching tale, a drug fueled, hazy, brutally confusing masterpiece. Reading In the End, You Kill Us Both made me feel like I needed to take the longest shower of my life so I could scrub the skin off my bones.
Is there anything better than a gore soaked, blood splattered tale of terror, revenge, and ghoulishly toxic queers? It's both vicious and grotesque in just the right ways, akin to the strangest, most horrible of acid trips. Brutal. Intense. So utterly easy to get lost in, all too easy to be absorbed by. This is the single most defining story of haunting, all-consuming love that surpasses anything on this earth. You know that feeling, when you love someone so strongly that they haunt every part of your life? That's what this novel feels like. Disturbing and bloody, it's a slow motion car wreck, it's a smoldering, stinking pit, stained with gasoline and reeking of death. What a deeply disturbing reading experience this turned out to be.
In the End, You Kill Us Both is surrealist horror at its very finest, at its very best - it's like experiencing the most luscious of nightmares, like a dream that's melting, like memories that are fading away. It's just so, so very weird, in the very best possible way. It's a novel that's all teeth and drool waiting to drag you down into the depths of Hell. In the End, You Kill Us Both is horrendous, foul, and, so damn beautiful - poetic, yet ugly too, destructive, yet healing. What a monstrous novel, an apocalyptic hellscape. Grim, gritty, grimy, coated in filth and rot and ruin, this is a heart-shattering, gut-wrenching tale, a drug fueled, hazy, brutally confusing masterpiece. Reading In the End, You Kill Us Both made me feel like I needed to take the longest shower of my life so I could scrub the skin off my bones.
Is there anything better than a gore soaked, blood splattered tale of terror, revenge, and ghoulishly toxic queers? It's both vicious and grotesque in just the right ways, akin to the strangest, most horrible of acid trips. Brutal. Intense. So utterly easy to get lost in, all too easy to be absorbed by. This is the single most defining story of haunting, all-consuming love that surpasses anything on this earth. You know that feeling, when you love someone so strongly that they haunt every part of your life? That's what this novel feels like. Disturbing and bloody, it's a slow motion car wreck, it's a smoldering, stinking pit, stained with gasoline and reeking of death. What a deeply disturbing reading experience this turned out to be.
"I still fought the urge to call over the banister to tell Georgia that I understood - that if her children were afraid of the howling demon I'd made of myself the week before, writhing and sweating through fractured dreams and migraines like interspersed lobotomies in a bed that had once belonged to someone else, then I couldn't blame them. If she was afraid, and if she'd had guilt about forgetting me because I'd been so strangely quiet without the withdrawals, well, she could let go of that too. I was always either howling in pain or hardly there at all."
If something you love in literature is reading about unhinged, disgusting, messy, toxic people and their earth-shattering love for each other, if you love when gore is described as beautifully as the most intoxicating poetry, if you love when horror is examined so sensually, it's like laying next to your lover in bed, then this is the book for you. There's a deep, dark, extremely dank sadness that hangs over this novel. Something about the way that this author writes, it's just... It's captivating, it felt like it expunged my soul. In the End, You Kill Us Both made me feel so seen I craved obliteration. It's a mortifying experience, it's skin crawlingly horrific, it's foul and festering, and a marvelous example of queer horror done right.
"I swear I could always feel it - my repentance, just waiting below the surface, biding time. I used to have really nasty dreams over it, but once I hit the Echo, y'know - they stopped for the most part. Got replaced by other things. I was convinced that the Devil would come for me in my sleep and drag me through the floor into a fiery pit, where I'd burn and burn forever."