Happy Goat Horror

What does a young woman do with the bucket of hate she carries around from her abusive childhood? Lucy is about to find out. What does a man do when his faith in the security of his nation crumbles? FBI Special Agent Javier Torres is about to find out. And when shape-shifting, man-eating daemons are revealed to exist, who does the Succubus known as “Vespid” feed on? The rich and the poor alike find out, because sometimes a girl’s gotta eat.

Dark bleatings, my hungry tribe! I recently read this book (the first in a trilogy), and I’m very excited because I feel like I’ve unlocked a new author. I love it when this happens! If you can’t already tell, I really enjoyed this novel and I’ll be reading the next two within the month.

Our story begins with Lucy, an exotic dancer (by the way, the depiction of work life in a strip club is outstanding), who is attacked by some creeps one night on the way to her car. Luckily for her, there’s another woman nearby…a woman that unexpectedly totally f***s these guys up. And rightly so, in my opinion. I think as openers go, this is excellent. Lucy is established so quickly and so well that I was instantly on her side and invested, and that is one hell of an inciting incident. There’s more to it than how I’ve described it, and thus, a mystery begins!

It’s actually quite hard to talk about without spoiling the fun details as they’re unfolded in the story, but there is a detective character that has been trying to track down this woman, Lucy’s saviour, because…well, let’s just say that she’s left a trail and the law is very interested in finding her.

But this woman isn’t just a vigilante saving women. In fact, she might not even be human.

What really struck me about this novel was the themes, or what I interpreted as the themes, anyway. Personal identity was a huge one for me, and the struggles a lot of us have with how we perceive and present ourselves. I’m friends with a lot of exotic dancers and I have seen first hand dozens of times how horribly they’re spoken to and how lowly they’re regarded by a lot of people, when actually, these women tend to be lovely people who don’t deserve the disdain. At all.

On the note of perception, there was also a lot in there about how people perceive others, and how they treat them as a result of the judgments they make. There’s prejudice, uncomfortable (but contextual) language, and interactions and internal reflections that made me feel sad. We can all be cruel enough to ourselves, especially if there are things about us we find hard to accept, but life is made 1000 times harder when other people are cruel to us on top of that.

So, in terms of the horror, what are we looking at? There’s for sure an emotional and psychological aspect that might hit pretty hard, depending on your own experiences, and there’s also a lot of the really fun stuff. An interdimensional succubus, for example. Deaths. Lots of lovely, bloody deaths. Mayhem. Soul absorption. I could go on, but I shan’t, lest I spoil.

I really enjoyed this and would recommend it to horror fans. If you’d like to check out the book, I’ve popped the link below for you:

A GIRL’S GOTTA EAT: SUFFERING SEQUENCE: BOOK ONE

Bleeeeat!