This book is not for me. I loved the cover and the description. But this book is extremely YA and very modern. I love horror and thrillers but this one is more like cannibal modern teens with all the Coachella problems. I’m sure this book would be loved by many others which is fantastic but it’s just definitely not for me.

Thank you to the publisher for letting me read this on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book just wasn’t my type of book, I was hoping the title went a whole different way but it didn’t I was disappointed.

Zoey, Jasmine, Valeria, and Celeste become ghouls after the Hollowing. They can live a fairly normal life as long as they eat synthetic flesh. The girls are ecstatic to attend their first music festival as ghouls. At the music festival, something weird happens to Val and she ends up eating someone. What made Val so hungry that she would eat a human? Something weird is taking place behind the scenes. The girls are determined to find out what is going on and stop it before more ghouls eat humans.

Kayla Cottingham does a fantastic job developing the characters. I enjoyed each of them. The LGBTQ+ representation is an amazing feature of the book as well. I really enjoyed the plot of the story and the details in each scene. I especially enjoyed the flashback scenes describing how the Hollowing affected each character. There was a perfect balance between horror, mystery, and adventure. I highly recommend it! 4/5 stars.

The short and sweet? I flipping LOVED this book. I devoured it in a single sitting. I loved the characters, I loved the creepy concept, I love how grotesque and macabre it was while somehow also being incredibly wholesome. 10/10 would recommend.

Warm Bodies based in Coachella with LGBTQ+ main characters all in a YA read, this book has it all. This was such a fun read and I enjoyed every bit of it and didn’t want to put it down. I loved Zoey and her friends and their friendship with being Hollows. I liked the mini back stories and excepts you got before each chapter that helped you learn more about each character and the story. This was quick read and I also found myself laughing out loud at parts. Overall, I highly enjoyed this YA zombie ish horror and recommend to anyone who wants a fun read. It is gory at parts so just know that going into it.

I LOVE this book. Not a surprise since I loved her first book as well. A fun queer thriller with characters you want to root for. I like that it spins the traditional zombie story, where the ghouls are a part of normal life, until someone wants to make them monsters again.

I received a copy from NetGalley for review.

This book is delectable (lol yes I'm starting off with a pun). This book is like if you took iZombie and mixed it with Warm Bodies and threw them at a music festival. It's fun and queer and easy to digest. I ended up starting it at like 7 PM and was up until 11 PM and got about 78% of the way into the book before I had to FORCE myself to put it down and go to sleep. It was that good. In the story, we follow Zoey, Celeste, Jasmine, and Valeria as they get to go to a smaller version of Coachella. While there Valeria goes feral and it's up to Zoey, Celeste, and Jasmine to figure out why before something bad happens to Val for real. ON TOP of that, people have been going missing throughout the whole festival and the girls lowkey stumble into a conspiracy with how to revamp up the Hollowing (basically this timeline's COVID).

I really enjoyed the way the girls all worked together throughout the series. There was no fighting over boys (puke) or cattiness outside of very real situations on what to do next. I do wish that it wasn't a single POV. It would have been nice to get more of the current thoughts of the other main girls in the series and not just their POVs when we got flashbacks to when they first turned. Especially Celeste and Jasmine. They played a much bigger role in the story and getting their POVs, I think, would have added to it.

Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable read and I'll probably be purchasing this for myself.

Zoey and her friends, ghouls who eat synthetic versions of human flesh, have a music festival to go to as their last celebration before graduation, but on the first night, one of them goes feral; killing and eating one of the band members. Someone is drugging ghouls like them to go feral, and if the culprit isn't stopped soon, neither ghouls nor humans will be safe.

--

‘I remember once seeing a piece of art that said the people you love become ghosts inside of you. What I realised now was that it was true of the people you killed, too.’

I’ve been seeing this book a lot recently, so of course I was excited to have been able to get an ARC. It seemed like a well rated sapphic horror book and was surprisingly pretty short.

And thankfully, I enjoyed this a lot! The characters were fun; Zoey’s inner monologue at times was hilariously amusing, her and Celeste’s romance was adorable, the friendships between the four girls were wholesome and it was lovely to see how supportive they all were of each other. The book gave me similar vibes to Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle, except if the main friend group had actually healthy friendships!

It was fast-paced and kept me hooked throughout, with flashback snippets of the Hollowing - the climate event that caused a small percentage of humans to turn into ‘ghouls’, creatures that can only eat human flesh to survive - and other fun tidbits here and there, like chat logs between background characters and social media posts that tied in to the main story. It didn’t feel info-dumpy about the Hollowing, whilst also didn’t make me want for more. Despite some parts of the plot being predictable and the horror aspect didn’t affect me enough to really be scared or creeped out, it didn’t take away from my enjoyment (but keeping in mind, it takes a lot for horror to get to me).

Overall, a great short and snappy sapphic horror book!

This is a delicious treat of a horror book! A full course meal that left me completely satisfied! I love new takes on the zombies and monsters of horror any day, but this is going down as a favorite.

Zoey and her friends are ghouls. They are a part of the Hollow People that make up a section of the world's population now. Ghouls become gaunt, a bit elongated, with claws and vicious fangs and require human meat to live on. That's why Zoey and the girls are taking a nice big cooler of Synflesh with them to a desert music festival. However, it's not a fun festival for long.

I loved this so much! It really made me laugh while being creepy and gory, which is a difficult task.

Content warnings for gore, violence, death, and mention of deadnaming.

Out April 25, 2023!

Smutty faeries are out, zombies are back in?

Two years ago, people began getting sick. While the majority eventually recovered, a small percentage underwent a transformation known as the Hollowing. The Hollow were only able to survive by consuming human flesh and their cravings soon turned feral. Over time, synthetic meat allowed humanity to return to something like normal.

In the present day, four girls are planning one last hurrah before graduation: Desert Bloom, a music festival. On the first night, however, one of the girls kills a band member. As the body count begins rising, it’s clear someone is targeting Hollows. And if the girls can’t figure out who’s behind it soon no one is getting through the weekend alive.

I typically love pandemic/outbreak novels but the parallels to Covid were hard to ignore here. I’m not sure if this was written using 2020 as inspiration or if I’m now seeing zombie outbreaks in a new light. Still, this was a shockingly fast read — when I looked down to see my progress I was surprised that I was halfway through the book!

I welcomed the quick pace and finished this one in no time. While it was enjoyable for the afternoon, I’m not sure it’ll be that memorable for me in the long run.

I absolutely loved this book! If was a page turner from the very beginning. I found the characters very endearing and interesting, and the story was very original. I will definitely be buying a hard copy when this comes out!

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. And when I request the e copy I, of course, thought it seemed interesting. But it was even better than that. Queer, ghoulish teens just trying to have one last hurrah before graduating high school. And then chompy madness ensues. It was an easy and fun read. I found myself invested in the story and the characters. I wish this book had been around when I was a teenager. I'd have been all over it.

A wild (and bloody) ride! 🩸🎡

This is a YA thriller/horror/zombie book about four best friends who take a road trip a music festival the summer after high school. This takes place 3 years after “The Hollowing” which is a global event in which parts of the population started became cannibalistic “ghouls”, our main characters included.

What I loved!
-Cover hooked me from the start. I appreciate the author putting the trigger warnings at the beginning.
-The setting?!? Desert music festival?! Amazing.
-Most of the book is told from Zoey’s first person perspective, but some passages share flashbacks of the characters hollowing experience, emails about the incident, news articles and more. This added a lot of depth to the book and was super fun to see all the different perspectives!
-Diverse cast, full of back stories! Bi main character and trans main characters. LGBTQ+ romance!
-Best friends to lovers!


“I mean come on. We hid a literal body together. It doesn’t get much more ride-or-die than that.”

4 stars! Looking forward to seeing more from the author. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the e-ARC. 🖤

I received an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I do not have a lot of feelings about this book. Point blank. I consume a lot of horror, and it's a common critique of the genre that characters can often be extremely unlikable or feel one dimensional. Sometimes it's for the sake of the story, sometimes it's so that you were excited when they're killed off or whatever the reason. Often it's a detriment to the story. I feel like the characters in This Delicious Death feel a little one dimensional, but not necessarily in a way that feels detrimental to the story as there is plenty of plot to keep the reader involved.

I'd recommend this book for anyone who likes YA horror, specifically stories that play with the zombie archetype. It's not doing anything you haven't seen before, but it's still a fun read with enjoyable queer characters.

This Delicious Death was my first book by Kayla Cottingham, and I look forward to reading more! I don’t read many YA books, but if this is what I am missing, I suppose I have a whole new genre of book to read.

The Hollowing event is a virus that swept through the world, causing people to turn into ghouls, but could easily live a normal life while eating synthetic flesh. We read about Zoey and her friends, Celeste, Jasmine, and Valeria, who are ghouls themselves, as they attend their first music festival since the Hollowing. They didn’t expect one of them to kill and eat a boy! Also, things are quite right at the festival… others are turning up dead.

I enjoyed that we could get the girls' backstories as it was sprinkled within the story. I loved the queer representation! The writing was excellent, and the horror aspect delivered.

Thank you to SOURCEBOOKS Fire, Netgalley, and Kayla Cottingham for gifting me a digital eARC copy of This Delicious Death. I am leaving this review voluntarily. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

My thanks to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This is the second book by Kayla Cottingham and I have to say, I loved it! Intensely dark, graphic, but not overly so, and tense. This book listed a content warning at the beginning with all kinds of warnings, even if something was just briefly mentioned, and I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into going in. This book is filled with very diverse characters, featuring a friend group that includes people of color, a Trans person, bi, and lesbians. There was definitely body horror galore! I wasn't sure how I would feel about that because I'm not in love with over the top gore, but I felt that Cottingham struck a nice balance with her descriptions, giving you enough to terrify you, but not gross you out. This was the perfect YA horror for me!

It's been two years since The Hollowing changed the world, transforming a swath of the world's population into flesh-eating, rampaging ghouls. However, in that time, things have gotten back to a state of near-normal thanks to the advent of SynFlesh, an artificial protein that quells the hunger. What were once murderous monsters have more or less reverted to their old selves … though the ghoul impulses are still there and can be triggered. Many people live in fear of their former friends and family members, the ones who look human most of the time but sometimes change into hideous fiends.

Zoey's family is among that fearful bunch. They don't know how to process what their daughter has become. And they have zero forgiveness, comfort, or acceptance to offer. Instead, they have a chain for the bedroom door if she shows signs of losing control.

Zoey's best friend Celeste has a mom who is the polar opposite. Wendy accepts her daughter's new condition as fully and unconditionally as she accepted her child's coming out as trans. She also accepts her child's best friend without hesitation. Both teens were at summer camp when the terrible incident happened, and they both became Hollow together. They did unspeakable things to survive, but those crimes have been pardoned. They weren't in their right minds. So when Zoey and Celeste take their first road trip together, to a music festival called Desert Bloom, Wendy is totally on board … stocking their cooler with enough Costco purchased SynFlesh to last the whole trip.

The prospect of Zoey, Celeste, and their besties Valeria Vega and Jasmine hitting the road together, flirting and having fun on the last summer before they have to split up for college? It's too much to resist. Unfortunately, Zoey's fun is a little complicated because of a growing affection for her best friend. Young love is blossoming, but she dares not say anything—what if it wrecks the friendship? Better to suffer in silence, right?

Well, maybe not.

Soon enough, the quartet will have plenty to keep them distracted from such mundane problems. At the concert, something triggers Valeria's ghoul behavior and a cute but judgmental guy from an up and coming band winds up dead and devoured. The foursome is faced with the very real need to figure out what the hell is happening, and that will involve hiding the body before donning detective caps and tracking down clues. Their investigation will reveal a secret, shut-down facility and its unwholesome experiments as well as a whole new spin on the Hollowing, a truly monstrous breed of ghouls known as the anthropophogi … As they race to find answers, the friends discover that an all too human evil has been reading the festival to become one massive smorgasbord. Is there a way to stop the coming horror, and if not that to at least survive with their humanity intact?

With This Delicious Death, Kayla Cottingham has done the remarkable task of taking something that's overdone (that whole zombie apocalypse thing) and finding a way to make it fresh and interesting. Like other pandemics, the initial outbreak was a bad time, but the rigorous application of science and good government has stemmed the worst elements and found a way for people to return to a kind of normality. But the risks, though mitigated, are never eradicated ...

Using the Hollowing/ghoul state as a kind of parallel for the kinds of ostracisms kids with alternative sexual orientations or gender identities face is also a clever twist on the subject matter. Way back in 1988, Clive Barker linked up the monsters of his novella Cabal and the subsequent film adaptation Nightbreed (1990) with these same concerns. Barker's 'breed were the sympathetic stand in for queer folks and other outsiders, and the human beings who hunted them were the real monsters. Cottingham doesn't replicate those particular projects from a plot perspective, but This Delicious Death is nevertheless an LGBTQA+ YA fiction bookend to both that novella and film. They might not exist in the same universe, but they both share a heartfelt reinterpretation of and a love for flipping scripts about widely reviled monsters. This is a book that never doubts its queerness, and while some of the characters' barely concealed hate for ghouls is an analog for homophobia, transphobia, etcetera, Cottingham's narrative neither shames nor apologize for its protagonists, and it never accepts those naysayers and haters at their word.

One of the cool touches about the book from a structural perspective is how the author drops us into the middle of things and yet also fills in the blanks on what came before without devolving into "as you know" infodumps. Every chapter is divided into two pieces. An opening epigraph, fictional newsbyte, or flashback scene immerses us in how things came about, while the bulk of the chapters keep the present day narrative rolling along. The worldbuilding is therefore as immersive as the main storyline, particularly in the way it provides a lens for how the decisions our main quartet of friends make come about.

The mood of the thing is often suspense and horror, but with liberal doses of humor thrown in. Zoey and her friends are a funny lot, jokey and free-spirited. In fact, I'd love to spend more time with this book's survivors in a follow-up volume. The world they occupy, however, is not quite as free spirited or freewheeling as these characters. Cottingham gives us an emotionally rich reading experience, using those worldbuilding elements as well as some of the encounters Zoey and her friends endure to stoke anger, build frustration, chill us to the bone, and even break our hearts.

The main narrative of This Delicious Death is a survival horror story blended with a summer road trip yarn. It's not quite a coming-of-age work, so much as an opportunity for the friends to embrace difficult truths about their tight group as well as the world they live in. It's a chance to get real one last time before saying an inevitable goodbye. And of course, there are life and death stakes of ravenous monsters prowling the night just to keep the pacing up …

Both of those aspects work well together in Cottingham's capable prose. The survival horror and summer road trip angle are perfectly synthesized, and though the narrative shifts from one mode to the other as the dominant motivator for a given scene or sequence, we never lose sight of the importance of the other. It's a challenging juggling act to keep all these balls flying around, but Cottingham makes it look easy.

This Delicious Death is the author's second novel. I look forward to checking out the first, My Dearest Darkest, for our annual Pride month read in June. However, I am also excited to see what the author cooks up in the future. This is a writer to watch, someone who appreciates penning a superb horror novel as well as composing relatable characters who happen to fall along the LGBTQA+ spectrum.

I wish this book had come along thirty years ago, when I was a confused teen grappling with my own sexuality. I hope it gives someone who might be dealing with that stuff in 2023 the two-fisted offering of delirious entertainment and the unapologetic reassurance that they are not struggling with these big, identity shaping topics alone in this weird, often difficult world. Kudos to Kayla Cottingham for writing such a moving and beautiful book.

Now, get moving on the next, please. Your readership is bound to be ravenous for the next. I know I am.
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A special thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks for offering an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This cover caught my attention right off the bat. And the synopsis made it seem like a Santa Clarita Diet thing and I loved that show. I didn't even realize this book was YA at first. Because even though it is somewhat comedic it is pretty graphic.

If you are looking for something with lots of blood and guts this definitely has it! I was so surprised. I think this is the most gore filled book I have ever read. But I mean it is a zombie book so, I think that's to be expected.

I really enjoyed this one. It was fun and gruesome. I think if you're into this kind of thing you'll enjoy it as well.

Thank you to Netgalley and Source Books Fire for this eARC in exchange for my honest review

Thank you to Sourcebooks Fire for sending me an early copy of THIS DELICIOUS DEATH. This one publishes on April 25.

I really enjoyed this book and I ate it up (pun intended) super fast. I was hooked from the very first paragraph. I loved these characters and this wild supernatural story. I loved how Kayla Cunningham intertwined current events but with a twist, a love story and a music festival all in one captivating story. Go get your holds and preorders ready for this one!

A few years ago, a virus swept through the world and people ended up being “hollow” or “ghouls” – they are empty inside and survived seemingly normal lives, except for their diet – human organs. Now they are all surviving on SynFlesh – synthetic organs.

Zoey, Celest, Valeria, and Jasmine are all ghouls who live together in Southern California. They’re about to graduate so in celebration they decide to head to a music festival. With their cooler or hard seltzers and SynFlesh they load up and head out.

Things take a turn for the worse the first night of the festival when Valeria goes feral. As her friends rally together to try to get the bottom of this, they can’t help but wonder if they will loose her forever and everyone at the festival is in danger.

Okay, this book – just yay! So many things I enjoy. I was dystopian and horror, but also had a delightful sapphic love story. The writing was on point and the author did a wonderful job of portraying some not so pleasant things (eating organs!). I just love a story where I can dive in and get lost and I was able to do so with this. I love a good dystopian novel where the world gets a big plague, and everyone is changed. My only complaint on this one was that the love story was towards the end, and I wished it would have been more present, versus at the end where it felt rushed.

Special thanks to SOURCEBOOKS Fire, @sourcebooksfire, and Netgalley, @netgalley, for this e-arc in exchange for the honest review.