lauriereadslohf's reviews
1518 reviews

This book is both dark and lighthearted, if that makes any sense. I would advise reading the series in order. I didn’t and I was a wee bit confused at times.

A quieter horror novellas always a nice change of pace. Great atmosphere and dread building. Review later. 

This is a brutal and gleefully fun novella!  I highly recommend it if you’re up for something like that.

Things start off when a man named Jack spies a beautiful woman moving in next door - through his binoculars. Ugh, yes. He’s a perv and he has some mommy issues. But it’s worse than that, actually, as we find out soon enough. I felt so bad for his dog. Evil men do not deserve the love of a dog, never mind one as devoted and sweet as a labrador. Nope. Dogs and their innocent ears should not be subjected to such deviant goings-on. Anyhow, this dude is a genuine creeper doing what creepers do while his unsuspecting new neighbor sets up house not realizing she’s being seen as prey.

Or not.

Meg is nobody's victim and she has moved out to the boonies for a damn good reason. She <i>feels</i> those creeper eyes on her immediately and she’s prepared to deal with them when the time comes. 

“The thing about predatory men was they hardly ever entertained the thought of predatory women.”

And then one dastardly turn of events happens followed by a whole helluva lot of action, adventure, gruesomeness and some perfectly placed black humor. I thought it was all delightful  but be warned the flashbacks to a traumatizing life altering event in Meg’s past are painful to read.

These people are all kinds of messed up so you’ve been warned but if you’re the kind of person who laughed like a maniac at the scene in Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart where Julia is chasing a naked man around an empty room, sticking him with a knife as he flails away, just flat out refusing to keel over quickly, this book was made for you as well as for me!

CW: 

A 12 year old is gang raped by a bunch of boys and then relentlessly harassed and bullied by this same pack of wolves.

This was a lovely little palate cleanser and I enjoyed this fantasy world of talking beasts so much. Review later.

Maya’s 18 birthday brings with it the family gift and it’s not some old portrait of grandma or a cupboard full of creepy dolls, nope, it’s something so much better than that (and no, I’m not telling you what is either)!

Maya’s story picks up several years later after her dreams and her family have been shattered. She’s now providing for her younger sister by working as an exotic dancer at a time when someone seems to be stalking and murdering vulnerable women in the most brutal of ways.

This is my kind of book. It’s savage and sexy and the main character is both strong and likable and that’s something too many books get dreadfully wrong. But not this time. She has moments of weakness but she absolutely does not have time to fall into a pit of emotional despair and “woe is me-isms”. This nasty villain is soon going to realize she’s messing with the wrong family!

The characterization is beautifully done and the attraction bits are extra spicy with a few nice breaks of unexpected humor. Also, the gross bits are so perfectly gross! So icky. The author doesn’t chicken out on the gruesome aspects of, well, you’ll see!

There’s a lot going on here and I wouldn’t have minded if the book were a little bit longer but I’ll take what I can get. It gave me some major <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/269806-hot-blood"> “Hot Blood” series </a> vibes and I’ll never complain about that! There are some typos and some easily fixable things here as others have noted but those things don’t bother me much. I’m giving it a solid ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️’s. I’d love to revisit this world again.

I saved my favorite quote that made me laugh like a loon but it might be a little spoiler, and you won’t understand unless you’ve read it so I’ll put in the spoiler tags.

“The weaver's cup would cummuth over” 😹

 

The ending of this book was such a dark delight! I didn’t see it coming and I haven’t read an ending this satisfying in a very long time. You horror fans must read it, you really must.

Benny Rose is an urban legend possibly cooked up to keep their kiddos in line. He comes out to torment and eat delicious wayward teens on Halloween because that’s what cannibals do! But when a group of meanish girls hatch a plan to host a slumber party in order to scare the new girl they might just end up scaring their own damn selves and worse . . . 

Set in the ’80s, this novella is filled with nostalgia, action and adventure, and some gruesome murdering! Early on in the story, my notes weren’t very kind towards these teens and it’s a huge credit to the author that she managed to really make things turn around character-wise because initially, I was thinking that if Benny Rose didn’t put them all (except maybe one) on a plate, I was going to have to rage a bit. I’m not saying more because I do not want to spoil any of the gruesome fun but there was no raging needed. You’ve all been spared for today, haha.

There is some disturbing and nasty imagery here and I mean that as a compliment! I loved the writing of these terrible things and these visions probably won’t leave my head for quite some time, if they ever do. And then there are the sublime sinister turns that are stated so matter of factly that I had to laugh through the shock of the revelations. It’s all so beautifully vicious in the end so prepare thyself beforehand. If you like a well-written action-packed slasher, you’re going to find yourself a new boyfriend in Benny Rose, the Cannibal King, for certain! 🙀😈😹 And no, I’m never taking back that line, don’t even ask!

 

 

This is a well-written gruesome book filled with unimaginable atrocities of the worst possible kind. I don’t say this lightly or with exaggeration. It is meant to disturb you and make you think about a few things.

It tells the tale of a world ravaged by a virus that infected all of the animals. Yes, all of them apparently. This then makes it super easy for the people in power to have all of the animals destroyed and to create a new source of protein for the people lucky enough to still be deemed people. The rest are raised as food which they package and market all nicely and call “special meat” and the “people” fall in line soon enough, acclimating to this new dietary change without thinking too much about what they’re actually ingesting. This supposedly also takes care of population control, immigration, poverty, probably even climate issues and keeps those in power wealthy and powerful.  I cannot even tell you how disturbing this entire thing is. A decade ago I read a book called “Meat” by Joseph D’Lacey and it was very similar in premise to this one and it put me off eating most meat forever. This one may very well do the same for you.

Initially, I felt sorry and compassion, even, for our narrator Marcos. He works at the processing plant and he seems sympathetic enough of a fellow. He despises what he now has to do for a living but his dad is dying of dementia and he needs to pay for his care. His wife has left him alone to deal with SO much grief. He’s very sympathetic initially but then he receives a gift and I saw all too clearly where this was headed. He eventually makes several choices that made me despise him as much as every other repulsive person in this story and that’s all I’ll say about him.

Tender Is The Flesh is the bleakest kind of story. It pulls no punches from the get-go. You’ll know exactly what you’re getting yourself into and you can either immediately run or suffer through it all as I did. I don’t think there’s any middle ground. Once this book got its hooks in me I had to finish it. I had to witness every cruelty. I had to know how it would all end. And I deserved every terrible thing the author dished out because I kept going. But it did give me one of the best lines I’ve read recently: 

“When someone smiles, they’re showing their skeleton.”

The writing is blunt and to the point. It doesn’t luxuriate in its bloody deeds. It states them as facts. This is just the way the world is now and I think that choice makes the book so much more terrifying. It’ll make you sad and it’ll make you angry and it will disgust you. If you’re up for it, go get yourself a copy but don’t come back here blaming me for it!

CW:

Basically all of them, rape, infant death, animal death, animal cruelty, suicide, depression, cannibalism

 

A haunting tale of the bonds of friendship and the pain that ensues when that friendship begins to fade. 

Review in a bit.

I think I'm going with a 3.5 here. I liked most of it but I was hoping for more in the way of Deanna finding her way, finding a way to satiate her needs in a way that worked for her but instead it was a wee bit too romance heavy and leaned on the "the love of a good man is fixing me" trope and something about that just doesn't sit right with me. Unless, of course, I read it wrong and in that case, I'm sure someone will tell me soon enough.

But seriously at one point she even says something like "This love might be my salvation ." I want her to be her own salvation and find a man who will love and support and murder with her, hahahaha.

The villain was a disgusting monster which is to be expected but his obsession was a little hard to swallow which was another little issue for me. I didn't understand why he'd possibly put his freedom in peril to do, well, what he planned to do . . . He seemed smarter than that even with his pathetically inflated ego.

I'm sorry I'm like this but I have to be honest. I do recommend it though. It's a very high 3 star, an almost-but-not-quite 4 star read. I'll be reading the next one and also reading more of her other work because I do enjoy the way she writes very much. It's sexy and dark but this one wasn't my most favorite but it also wasn't my least favorite.

Damn, I really hate the three reviews the most. 

Review to come, rating may change