Synopsis
From Chuck Tingle, USA Today bestselling author of Bury Your Gays, comes Fabulous Bodies, a supernatural joyride where Drive meets Beetlejuice.
Poppy Stringer was born to be a star.
An aspiring fashion influencer by day, Poppy moonlights as a grave robber to make ends meet, wheeling and dealing dead bodies across Palm Springs.
When her hero, the flamboyant, piano-slamming rockstar Eddie Michaels, unexpectedly dies, Poppy gets a call to retrieve his body from the medical examiner’s office for a lucrative sum. It could be the last job she’ll ever need—if everything goes to plan. But the night’s delivery quickly veers off course when Eddie wakes up.
Now Poppy must fight for her life if she hopes to survive this blood-soaked joyride of carnage and extravagant entertainment.
Also by Chuck Tingle:
Lucky Day
Bury Your Gays
Camp Damascus
Straight
Review
Huge thanks to the publisher for inviting me to give this audio arc a listen! I really enjoyed Bury Your Gays, so I jumped at the chance to give this one a listen. A simpler cover than my previous read by the author, but I love the colors. Mara Wilson(!) does the narration for this. She does a great job of bringing the main character, Poppy, to life.
Poppy is a social media influencer on the rise. The only thing about being on the rise, though, is that it’s not currently paying the bills. The problem with that is that an influencer has to be up on trends, fashion, lifestyle, all things that are evolving constantly. Things that are expensive. Let’s not forget that Poppy also has a daughter to take care of. Her solution? Stealing and selling corpses to the highest bidder. As you can imagine, that’s a night job that brings her into pretty close proximity with some shady folks … something awfully different from the glamorous life she portrays on her phone. But on the day her musical idols dies in a freak accident, she receives a call that changes absolutely everything, someone wants to hire her, for an unbelievable sum, and what they want is her recently deceased idol, Eddie’s, corpse.
One thing I’m picking up here, that I am also carrying over from my time with Bury Your Gays, is that the author will never hand us something that’s not actually a blend of somethings. While BYG was horror slasher and scifi, this one feels more horror slashery and supernatural. Yet it’s also more—body horror that plays in undead and even zombie tropes before stomping its way into otherworldly entity. It smacks readers with the eerie and uncanny, as Eddie Michaels is both genuinely dead and also not. It makes me wonder what exactly the flesh of a body counts for if the person, the being, is truly within.
This one felt particularly heavy. While there are things surrounding content creating, social media, and clout chasing in general, the undertone of what’s left unsaid hit me the most. In the age of indie writers, authors, blogs, and all-things reviewers, it can be daunting to progress in a world where social media is designed by an algorithm that mostly seems to award those that funnel funds into it. While this novel features an adult doing the chasing, there are warning signs for the younger ages that feel like these things are what really matters in this world. We teach children, and allow ourselves to be fooled too, that things like interactions, like counts, shares, and saves are the sum of our self worth, and that’s a mighty dangerous foe. And that’s before accounting for the literal murderous reanimated corpse!
I really enjoyed the dynamic that blossoms between Poppy and her daughter. From their first on-page appearance, where Poppy is more busy with content than parenting, to that burgeoning, growing, burning maternal need to get back to her baby. If love is real then Poppy spent too long being blind to it, taking for granted all the things that truly matter most. But the author hit a home run for me in their ability to tie this into the theme in the paragraph above. Poppy realizes slowly throughout the novel how blinded she’s been, how nothing whatsoever could ever be more important than her daughter. Spending real quality time with her. It works beautifully as a driving force in the novel, and is a powerful message for readers. There’s even the darkly humorous note that Poppy’s neglectful, downright nonexistent, father is to blame for her own parental awakening.
The action, which does happen quite often in this one, is really gruesome and gory. Eddie’s ability to remove people’s impulse control, to force them to do whatever he says, reminded me of the One Wish Willow in Obsession. However, instead of a one-time deal with the ability to erase all autonomy and self, Eddie can do so at will, over and over again. And he uses this ability with gleeful abandon. The amount of blood soaked people and locations left over from this one is astounding. And shockingly unique, too. By the end of this novel, Poppy has to be one of, if not THE most, injured character I’ve ever seen in any story. While a few people thought my Detective Williams faced too many injuries in Welcome to Cemetery, this one truly elevates that to infinity. While this does play into the supernatural, which affords more extended disbelief, I still wondered how in the hell she was alive, let alone standing too. Good for her! I’d guess it’s more of that maternal adrenaline-fueled need to get to her daughter again.
If you are not used to Tingle’s work, but are willing to give stories that are kind of out there a go, this one is perfect for you. The horror is on par with Leede’s new Headlights and does share a sort of otherworldly vibe if you need a comp. Vividly unique, wildly gory, and heinously deadly.
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