While a short book, this is an extremely dense book filled with a lot of heavy emotion and despair. The main character is simply filled with torment both emotionally and physically. The ending, especially, is just an absolute roller coaster and that final line is killer.

For such a short book it still ends up over staying it's welcome a lot. I felt nothing for the character we follow and the voice we are given just ends up being annoying. I do think there is a good story here but boy does it need a little more work put into it.

I'm sorry but this book was not for me. Not badly written at all but not at all what I expected. I won't post a review anywhere else regarding this book.

Living in poverty and dealing with alcohol dependency, our main character begins to deal with some strange events. Rot is a story detailing the experience of a middle age woman battling her failing mind and body.
It’s an enjoyable and unsettling read, but it leaves the reader wanting more. The world building was lacking. The book would really benefit from editing.

Thank you NetGalley for this book

I wanted to love this short book. The premise was so enticing. And I lived the idea of losing one's self, one's grip on reality, sanity, in isolation while a storm brews. Unfortunately, this story needs a lot of work. So much needed more explanation, back story, description, fleshing out. There was way too much repetitiveness. The writing errors were through the roof. A good editor could set this story on a path to five stars, for now it has a long ways to get there.

Wouldn’t call this the best horror book I’ve read. Really repetitive throughout (we heard about the main characters gout countless times) and there were a lot of spelling and grammar errors and animal cruelty which I really dislike. The story was ok but probably wouldn’t recommend. Thanks to net galley and the publisher for this arc.

Richard Coiley understands all the tropes needed to create an horrific modern day horror story and uses them well.
This could perhaps have been the premise for a John Carpenter film that never got made? Or could these be the scenes Alfred Hitchcock deemed too horrific to include in 'Psycho'? Or more frightening still has Guy N. Smith dictated these words from beyond the grave to scare a new generation of horror aficionados with one final invasion of killer rats and frogs?
The claustrophobia of the story is chilling: a nurse slowly drinking herself to death, trapped inside her own home, with a howling blizzard outside. The author adds further layers of terror: her gas has been cut off; the gout in her toes is crippling her; she's about to run out of electricity; her phone's only got 10% battery left; and then, there's the festering horror of a dark entity lurking outside her bedroom.
Darkness permeates every single page. Death can not be far away. Can she survive the terrible battle of wills fought on the astral plane with a doppelganger from hell?

I liked the growing paranoia and isolation, the seeming break with reality, the grim world. But the story isn't well written and needs more, whether just description or character development or SOMETHING, to bring the reader closer in. There was also a big use of animal torture and death that I never like.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me try this

First of all I'd like to thank NetGalley and The Book Guild for the opportunity to rate and talk about this ARC. A thank you to Richard Coiley for the creative energies.

The idea and passion behind this novella is strong. You can tell that the author is trying to show the manic state of the main character through their writing.

However, this book is very unfinished and needs a good overhaul. It's not only down to editing but some whole chapters need a rewrite. Grammar, spelling, wrong words used are only just a few of the problems that I noticed.

I found myself very confused by the last two chapters and it took me a whil to understand what they were trying to show us.

That might have been because there was a lot of tell, or else the author didn't know what they were trying to explain.

There is a lot of animal death in this book which I am not keen on.

It did take me a while to get into the book, once I got into it I did enjoy bits of it and the pace of it.

The idea behind this book is incredible. Bits of it made me feel like I needed to take a shower, which I love in a horror book. However throughout the book there's a ton of grammatical errors. The book also tends to just repeat itself. It's a cycle of "oh it's nightime" "ah here's the scary thing" "good it's morning". I really wish I could've enjoyed it more. I think with a bit more thought put into it, it would be an incredible read.

Gloomy and bleak, this book had all the elements needed for a really good horror book. However, the writing style was not for me and left a lot to be desired, plus the plot in general fell flat. I lost interest completely about 20% in and struggled to finish.

"Rot" by Richard Coiley is, quite frankly, one of the most disappointing books I have encountered in recent memory. Despite my best efforts to remain positive and balanced, this novel fell short on nearly every front.

First and foremost, the protagonist is utterly unrelatable and deeply unlikeable. From the very beginning, we are introduced to a character who used to be a nurse but is now consumed by poverty, despair, and alcoholism. However, Coiley fails to flesh out her backstory in a way that might evoke any sympathy or connection from the reader. We know she was a nurse, but so what? There are no anecdotes, no cherished memories, no glimpses into her past that might make us root for her. Instead, we are presented with a flat, one-dimensional character whose misery becomes tiresome rather than tragic.

The novel's setting is equally vague and uninspired. We know it takes place in the UK, but the lack of specificity about the location only adds to the overall sense of detachment and disinterest. The protagonist's internal monologue dominates the narrative, leaving little room for interaction with other characters. The absence of dialogue makes the book feel more like a monotonous, never-ending soliloquy rather than a dynamic, engaging story. The only brief moment of two-way dialogue occurs at 13%, and even that does little to break the monotony.

Coiley's attempt to inject suspense and horror into the narrative through the mysterious rot that spreads in the protagonist's house falls flat. The concept of black mould as a malevolent force is not particularly original, and the execution here is lackluster at best. The plot is painfully slow, and setting the entire story within the confines of a single room only exacerbates the feeling of claustrophobia and boredom.

One of the few redeeming aspects of the book is the description of the rats, which effectively evokes a sense of revulsion and horror. However, this is not enough to salvage the overall mediocrity of the novel.

The writing itself often leaves much to be desired. One particularly cringeworthy line stands out: “I’m sure I can feel its breath close to the back of my neck; it’s warm and clammy, like an old paedo’s feeling horny.” Such poorly crafted and tasteless metaphors only serve to further alienate the reader.

In conclusion, "Rot" is an uninteresting and poorly executed novel that fails to adhere to even the most basic conventions of fiction writing. The lack of compelling characters, engaging dialogue, and a dynamic plot makes it a chore to read. There are reasons why certain rules exist in fiction writing—rules about supporting characters, dialogue, and varied settings—and "Rot" serves as a prime example of what happens when those rules are ignored.

Set against a gloomy, bleak winter season in the UK, our unnamed narrator spends her time at home, hiding away from people and reality. Dealing with the aftermath of the covid pandemic, losing her job, and the end of an abusive relationship, she descends in to isolation and slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) begins to grow paranoid and lose herself.

The chapters read like scrawled, detailed diary entries which read somewhat juvenile and felt like an odd choice at first but I grew to like it. I think Coiley likely chose first-person point of view to really let readers in on the narrator’s state of mind in the advanced stage of alcoholism. In addition, the way that this was written really did add to that feeling of fear and desperation that the narrator felt.

It’s repetitive in parts but still proves to be a tense and uncomfortable twist on a woman suffering from mental illness and trauma, and descending in to alcohol-related psychosis. While I enjoyed the content I found the execution to lack a little and the title to be misleading—did I miss said rotting? Still, this novella made for a quick read.

Thank you Book Guild and NetGalley for the digital copy in exchange for an honest review! Available 07/28/2024

The ONLY reason this is a 3 star read for me as opposed to 4, is because I PERSONALLY don’t enjoy first person povs.
I enjoyed the book a lot, though. It was a short and easy read, and then gore was very well written and great, very immersive.

Surprisingly good. I expected a fun read, from the premise, but this was excellent. I highly recommend this book to horror lovers.

Eh this was quite disappointing for me. I will say the pacing and imagery does an excellent job creating a disorienting, horror-movie style experience but that’s about it. The prose isn’t great, the underlying themes are unexplored, and a lot that should be inferred or felt is just stated outright. For example, the abuse dynamic. Were explicitly told a few times the main character experienced an abusive marriage. There’s a gesture to its impact on her when she says, as explicitly as possible, that her history of domestic violence made her accustomed to the feeling of having her hair pulled. If instead the marriage history was revealed to us slowly over time, or more subtly through her reaction to the possession, and the possession itself was shaped more fully by the dynamics of abuse, it could be an interesting exploration of domestic violence and its legacy through the possession trope. Because it’s just stated explicitly three times, none of that thematic potential is realized. This is true of all the themes, from lockdown to mental health crises to alcoholism. Very underwhelming.

From right at the start of this book.the action begins slowly at first so as to introduce us to the main and sole character of this chilling book. But then rapidly progresses as the story unfolds and continues to build speed until the very end.

A thought-provoking, fast-paced, quick read that will keep you thinking from the very first page.

Thank you to the publisher for an advance copy of this book through Netgalley.

Rot by Richard Coiley.
I loved the cover. Creepy. A good read. An easy quick read. Gory. My type of read. Very gory. Especially when I can picture it in my head. I felt dread. The poor nurse. I really did feel her isolation. I wanted to jump in and pull her out. Definitely different. 4*.

Blurb.
She used to be a nurse, caring for the sick and wounded. But now, she is a prisoner of her own misery – trapped by poverty, despair and alcoholism. Her life is a nightmare, and she has no control over anything. Her body is tormented by gout, her mind by self-loathing.

But things are about to get worse.

As winter approaches, a mysterious rot begins to spread in her house, infecting everything and everyone it touches. It is a deadly force that consumes both flesh and soul, leaving behind only decay and madness.

Will she be able to escape the rot, or will she succumb to its horrors?

#rot @richardcoiley #netgalley #bookreviewer #ad #thebookguild #horror #shortstory #generalfiction

3.5 stars rounded to 4. This is an emotionally very heavy book, and if I had to describe it in one sentence, it'd be this: the main character's misery, her depression, her desperation, even her illness and her boredom, grow to such a degree that they materialize as a sinister haunting. This is just my interpretation and says nothing about the bizarre ending. The writing felt like reading someone's journal: intimate, slow, erratic. There are scenes of body horror, one scene of animal abuse, but the story mostly hovers between psychological and supernatural horror. My single complaint would be that the story has very little to do with "rot"; the synopsis made me expect something entirely different. Still, I'd gladly recommend this short novella to everyone who's after intricate first-personal narratives of horrifying spirals into insanity, the story of a mind that's perhaps rotting from the inside.