DNF - I adored the premise of this book but there is a great deal of editing to be done before this story can reach its full height & that is the primary reason for which I am not finishing my read.

There is little, if any, context given to the reader to set the scene of where & when this story takes place. This is not something that innately needs to be done but, it certainly eases the flow of such topics as cannibalism, decomposition, disability, murder, sexual abuse, sexual violence against minors, etc...to have dedicated phrases set to explain some of the settings that are not to be gleaned by the abrupt introduction we are given to the story. I did enjoy the way that the story is presented to the reader; I am not a fan of prologues. However, Magdala acts too naively for someone who was privy to so much terror. There is little follow-through with her surroundings & she is not presented as a character who is without complex understandings. I am certainly not saying that I expected her to be able to read the cues of sexual violence that were taking place however, it made little sense to me that she would go off with a gruff, adult man when she had spent the majority of her life afraid of the actions of others.

Alongside having some further context given to the story as a whole I believe that the dialogue should be reworked to add a more crisp form of speech to the characters. The individuals in this story often bounce from one form of speech to another & stunts the flow of the story. Given that so many scenes involve very gruesome depictions of violence & gore, the written word can be employed very deliberately to ensure that the build-up to these moments is weighty & revelatory. An example of this is when Xavier is consuming the donkey (alive). This scene cuts so close to a minuscule transition scene & so quickly after another death that the impact was lost on me - I was prepared for something horrible to happen as the wording left me no room to doubt that the next scene would simply follow suit & have another destructive sequence take place.

I do not want my comments to be taken to mean that the book should be elongated - quite the contrary. I think that the overall length of the book is fantastic & alongside the actual context of the plot, the author has found their sweet spot. With that being said, there is a way to lead the reader into trusting that the characters are fully-fleshed out human beings without needing to detail their entire life span & Chronishter accomplishes this by introducing the creationist stories which see the characters place themselves within the realities of these imaginings. I adored the inclusion of a storytelling competition & found that this was a brilliant way to deepen the reader's understanding of the world without including a prologue which might have otherwise been used to list the complexities of the circumstances.

In all, I will be seeking this book out again because I truly fell in love with the concept but, Chronishter merits an editor who will diligently help carve out the essence of the story that they have to tell. This book could be fantastic & overwhelming; it is riddled with horror & graphic descriptions that encourage the mind to dwell on those encounters. I want to see this book succeed & I feel that by reworking some of the general flow, the dialogue, the tone, vernacular & speech patterns, as well as constructing Magdala's actions in a more rounded way, would see this book soar.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC.

This was a beautiful and horrifying book, it felt a little reminiscent of The Road. I absolutly love Chronisters writting style, and her world building. I never really felt like I knew where the story was heading, but each journey connected beautifully to the last. My only small grib was with the editing, I think I would have enjoyed it more with an acknowledgement of the passage of time. I was always a little thrown out of the story everytime we jumped forward in time, with no marker to inform us we were moving forward.

Otherwise this was a fantastic post-apocalyptic story, that seems little to realistic to our future

For a long time I have been craving a book that feels like The Last of Us… and I finally got it.

I could hardly put this book down. The opening scene is intense and drops us right into the strange, scary world. For the first 30 pages or so, I was a little bit frustrated because I didn’t know much about the world. We know they’re wandering the desert in what seems like the post apocalypse and that we are a couple decades into (what seems like) a zombie virus. Magdala and Xavier encounter a not-so-human person who has “become the desert” and has melons growing off them. About to die of thirst, Xavier says Magdala can eat a melon but that it is like cannibalism. I wanted to know what that thing was, how it got that way, and what was the deal with the melons- and even by the end of the book we still don’t get a clear explanation. But I realized my frustration may have sparked because I’ve read so much fantasy and sci-fi lately that info dumps everything you need to know within the first 3 chapters. In Desert Creatures, we get to wander about and discover the world on our own. It feels like a real journey.

Overall, the plot is very good. Elam’s section is a little slow and sometimes redundant, but it quickly picks up again. Every character we meet has a purpose and unique arc, and I was especially impressed by how much Magdala grows. By the end of her first act, I really thought she would have ended up in someone’s clutches and have a tragic story because she was so completely dependent on her father, but that was not the case at all. I would have loved to know what happened to her between losing her father and meeting Elam. For a book that is only 350 pages, we get a broad, dramatic story with lots of characters.

The one thing that did frustrate me was that I had trouble imagining exactly what the desert creatures were. People and animals get sick, and so they somehow absorb into each other, and melons grow off them? They don’t seem super aggressive or fast. How do people get like that? We know that lots of people are desert sick- Magdala was very sick but she never “turned.” The people did not seem very concerned with this creatures or whatever the virus is that made them become like that. And the cactus-sitters, I couldn’t get an image. I pictured people walking around with a cactus literally stuck to them… but I don’t think that’s right.

Thank you for the arc and opportunity to review!

I didn’t get too far into Kay Chronister’s “Desert Creatures” because I found myself very quickly reminded of one of my favorite reads - Walter M. Miller Jr. 's sci-fi classic “A Canticle for Leibowitz.” After all, both set in a post-apocalyptic southwestern United States, with some of the remnants of humanity scrambling for existence alongside mutants, with a church being one of the few institutions left maintaining any shred of civilization.

However, “Desert Creatures'' almost feels like a well-crafted update. The world that Chronister crafts is much grittier, darker, and at times out-and-out nightmarish. The beasts that roam her deserts are impossible horrors that would not be out of place in the slightest in a Lovecraft story. The corrupt church based in a ruined Las Vegas isn’t so much focused on keeping a civilizing light flickering as much as it is on squeezing whatever it can from utterly desperate pilgrims and quashing any so-called heretics that it deems a threat. And while it’s not quite clear what exactly ruined the world, ecological devastation reigns supreme in the aftermath.

To a reader who, among other things, feels worn down by near-constant cycles of bad news, eco-anxiety, and is an ex-Catholic who has long grown cynical of most organized Christianity, there’s an unexpectedly immediate familiarity to all of the aforementioned. Also unanticipated was the resultantly strong kinship that I managed to feel with the book’s main character Magdala as she strives not only to survive but also to find healing. But probably least expected and most appreciated of all was the little nugget of hope that Chronister manages to plant in her rough and badly decayed world, making the deep immersion within all of its bleakness all the more worth it.

I haven’t had any kind of post-apocalyptic work resonate with me like this since I first read my beloved “Leibowitz” so long ago. To say the least, Chronister’s debut work is a strong recommendation from me. Not only was I able to become deeply absorbed amongst its memorable setting, plot and characters, but it honestly felt like “Desert Creatures” was able to therapeutically commiserate with me on more than a few of current fears and anxieties before providing me with a surprise (and admittedly needed) pick-me-up.

I typically use reading as an escape from reality; this is not one reality I’d ever want to escape to. The setting of this book was my worst nightmare. I was constantly thirsty and hungry while reading this. When I first started reading this, I was really afraid this was going to be a really gruesome splatter punk novel but I couldn’t be more wrong. There are some really horrific things that happen in this story but the author explains it in such a way that it’s almost poetic. Everything was easily digest-able and didn’t make me squirm. I absolutely loved this story and the characters. This had me hooked and I was often thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it. I have absolutely nothing to compare this to as it’s one of the most original concepts I’ve ever read. I’d recommend this to anyone!