Sacrificial Animals
By: Kailee Pedersen
This book was so different than anything I have read lately in the best way! An awesome mix of ancient Chinese mythology, supernatural horrors, and a long waiting and patient malevolence. Flashing between the past and the future a coming of age/ queer awakening story. A single, horribly abusive father and his 2 sons. Grappling with the trauma from child hood and the reality of their father’s last wishes for them to return to the family farm. An isolating and unnervingly dark tale were something or someone is off but you can never really put your finger on it until the devastating yet satisfying end. This book was steeped with unease and I loved every second of it! Please check trigger warnings - Trigger warning for animal & child abuse.

It's a slow burn with a spare writing style that still manages to be deeply sensorial--reminded me just a bit of Cormac McCarthy. A strange, scary, and moving read.

[received an arc from netgalley and st. martin's press, thank you!]

very beautifully written!! i loved this a lot as a character drama but wasn't really into its mystical motifs--in general its themes were far more interesting before you had a clear explanation for them. pederson has a lovely way with words in terms of deep, innate human emotion and the complicated relationships between the characters; however, the plot began to drag a bit beneath the character exploration; i felt like it would've worked better as a short story.

Oh how I loved this book. There is a few trigger warnings. It talks a lot about hunting, and not so nice to animals.
This is another version of the "fox woman" tale , which is one of my favorites. This author can write so well. Her characters were amazing. She is definitely one to watch for sure, for future works.

Oh, the struggle is real for son #2! Our narrator, Nick, is incredibly psychologically burdened trying to win his abusive, violent father's love and attention. As the second son in a rustic Nebraska setting, hunting is a given. As a child with deep empathy for all living things, his father demands that Nick perform a violent hunting ritual that horrifies him for the rest of his life. Never getting over the violent act, Nick tries to make it right by showing future mercy to other animals that proves to be a deadly mistake.
As his mother's son inheriting her soft loving traits, he does whatever he has to to please his racist, angry, homophobic father after his mother dies in childbirth. Yet it is his older brother, Joshua, that wins his father's attention, regardless of him exiting his father's life when his father disallows Joshua's beautiful Asian daughter-in-law to enter their mansion of a home.
Nick struggles throughout his entire life showing obedience to his father, while trying desperately to be the man he wants to be. Things take a deadly turn when the dying father demands that Nick bring the family together - including Joshua's perfect, alluring wife - to make amends.
A violent tale woven with fantastical folklore into the lives of this doomed American family.

Inspired by Kailee Pedersen's own journey being adopted from Nanning, China in 1996 and growing up on a farm in Nebraska, this rich and atmospheric supernatural horror debut explores an ancient Chinese mythology.
The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. When he left rural Nebraska behind, he believed he was leaving everything there, including his abusive father, Carlyle, and the farm that loomed so large in memory, forever.
But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.
Punctuated by scenes from Nick’s adolescent years, when memories of a queer awakening and a shadowy presence stalking the farm altered the trajectory of his life forever, Sacrificial Animals explores the violent legacy of inherited trauma and the total collapse of a family in its wake.

My first read by Kailee Pederson. While I did enjoy this and had a pretty good time, it also did not blow me away. Lots of horror tropes here. They were done well enough to not be boring or repetitive but also nothing really new here that blew me away,. If you're looking for something revolutionary and new, you might want to keep looking. If you want a safe, familiar horror read then you should like this one:)

An elegant, detached violence pervades this story, an incredible debut novel that roots deep into your heart, weighing it down until you feel it sunk in your guts. The story is sparse, yet never feels wanting. It is a gentle portrayal of monstrosity, about how grief and loss can mediate the way a father understands his sons and how that dis-affection sets their courses throughout the universe.

The setting and characters are both comfortable. The world is precise, and I could feel the crunch of the snow under my feet as I walked along the winding forest paths in this story’s thousand acres. The characters felt intentional and grounded, maybe shaped by cruelty but never unbelievable. In fact, they were all too believable. There are decades of time to be consumed through this prose, through chapters alternating between the protagonist’s childhood and his present, and we have enough details to fill in those years, to feel their heft, but we are never bogged down.

The writing itself was stylized in an incredibly fitting way, always feeling distant and a little disjointed. There were small choices, like never using quotation marks to set aside speech, to sometimes odd adverb placement or sentence structure, that always kept this story in a dreamy space, not quite solid in your hands. The language was poetic and elaborate when it needed to be, and direct and terse when that was more fitting, all sculpted from the same ethereal clay that highlighted the magical realism ambience, even though those aspects were but a small part of this whole tapestry. What holds this back from being a five-star read for me was that I felt a little let down by the ending. The pacing was actually really wonderful, the way the past and present wove together to slowly build out the characters and the story, to reveal action and result in parallel. I didn’t need more action or more exposition, or a tighter or more frenetic pace. I just felt like there was a little something missing. There is a series of relationships that is telegraphed right from the beginning, and the eventual reveal was decisive and abrupt. That itself was fine, but I just finished and was left not with a question about the action of the plot but instead with a sense that there had to be something more. Of course, there is a lot to be explored in the way violence begets violence, how suffering can infiltrate our mindsets and become the language through which we converse with the world. The story isn’t short of thematic ideas to think about after finishing the last page. So, it wasn’t disappointing, it just didn’t quite live up to the intricacy and skill of the rest of the story and the writing.

This story of family and violence was meditative. It left me feeling wounded. Not all trauma results in eventual happy resolution; not all harms are repaid in proportionate measure; not all violence is done to the body, even if it lives in the skin.

I want to thank the author, the publisher St. Martin’s Press, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I received a free ARC, and this review is voluntary

Outside of a few key details that come later on within the story, the synopsis is on-point. With the way it was written, it was almost like you could feel the pain of the past when it was introduced, or discussed.

I could be wrong, but the writing itself seemed to have a stream-of-consciousness style to it, which isn't for everyone, but I enjoyed it. Bit of a tough read at times because it was a little personal, due to my own childhood experiences. However, the author does well in highlighting the psychological effects of what the synopsis mentioned as "inherited trauma."

It was a pretty wild story once things came together, but overall, it was worth the read.

A truly gripping book! I binged it, it was so good! Highly recommended read! 4.5 stars out of 5 for me!

I love reading horror books that deal with race, mythology, and family drama, so this should have been the perfect book for me. I ultimately feel like this book is really bogged down by its prose and structure.

The book is divided into two parts, then and now, with alternating chapters taking place while Nick is growing up at the farm and with the boys reunited following their father’s cancer diagnosis. The blurb talks about Nick’s sexuality (then) and his eventual affair with his brother’s wife (now), but I think this should have been left out as it doesn’t occur until more than halfway through the book. The structure doesn’t really work for me because both parts take place with the exact same characters in the exact same setting with the exact same dynamics. The “then” portion of the novel is about Nick fearing his father, being resentful of his brother, and trying to come to terms with the violence that surrounds him. The “now” sections of the novel are doing the same thing, but with the added character of Emilia, who is an enigma to both Nick and the reader. While very little happens in the book, the problem is more that character beats are repeated over and over in two timelines.

I love atmospheric prose, but I have to say that I think the prose in this book drags it down. The flowery phrases don’t add anything to character or to a sense of place. Because every sentence is pushed to its maximum, it has the effect of flattening everything out. When everything is “eternal,” a “mockery,” “vicious,” “violent,” a “submission,” then nothing is. These words are repeated heavily throughout the narrative, and they lose their punch pretty early on.

I think this would have been stronger as a novella, where the prose wouldn’t have dragged as much over time and where the events could have been less spread out. I would still recommend this book to those who love a dramatic and flowery writing style, but I would say go into the book knowing as little as possible about the story.

Just, wow. I don't even know where to begin. I'm so happy I got an advance copy of this book. It's a book I cannot wait to to see the reception for. I'm sure some will be put off by the slow burn but I absolutely loved it. It's only February and not to be hyperbolic, but this might end up being the best book I read all year.

The writing was absolutely phenomenal. At once, raw yet elegant. Then, vulnerable and frightening. I absolutely cannot wait to read more work by Pedersen and that this is their first novel is absolutely mind blowing. Mesmerizing, mysterious and taut.

Kailee Pedersen’s Sacrificial Animals is a family saga that combines Chinese folklore and American Gothic to great effect. One of the novel’s strengths is its dense, lush prose. Pedersen is an exceptionally skilled stylist and I kept pausing during reading to let the sentences sink in. This is the story of an unpleasant family and it has a nasty bite to it. I enjoyed the catharsis of the ending and loved the full fledged dive into folklore. Foxes occupy an important place in legend in both China and the US, and it was fascinating to see those myths woven together.

To me, the main weakness of the book was the thin plot. I think this would have made an explosive short story, but the novel’s length overpowered the action and reduced it to a simmer. That said, I still recommend the book for anyone wanting an atmospheric read and I will keep an eye out for what Pedersen writes next.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for an early copy of this book.

Kailee Pedersen did a phenomenal job of creating a story with so much build up and backstory towards the climax, that I had no choice but to sacrifice sleep to finish it. The complexity of the relationships portrayed in each chapter allowed you to see the reasoning why they became the people they were at the end and what was ultimately the nail in the coffin. Although I do wish there was a more lengthy climax and feel that Joshua's part in the ending was very brief for someone who was a main piece to the puzzle, I definitely enjoyed the pictures painted. The way each character was created and had their own personality allowed me to easily differentiate between them through the text and had me despising one in particular (looking at you Carlyle). Sacrificial Animals is a book that I'm looking forward to owning and adding to an empty space on my book case.

Huge thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC.