In ONE BLOODY THING AFTER ANOTHER by Joey Comeau, three eerie stories intersect–a psychopathic teenager who can see the ghost of her dead mother has a lesbian crush on her friend, who keeps her own mother–afflicted by a strange disease that makes her ravenous for living flesh–chained in the basement, and a cranky old man with a stupid dog who see a headless ghost every day and tries to figure out what it wants.
The story moves along swiftly, has a great sense of the macabre while also being mildly comic, but diffuses near the end, wrapping things up, but not very tidily. The story is more like a novella than a novel, and you can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Comeau had put the time and energy into adding another hundred pages or so–in my view it would have resulted in a polished, finished, excellent novel, and elevated the work from a passing fancy into something much deeper and more satisfying.
All that being said, I’m happy to recommend this one, as I really enjoyed the story and the writing style.
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