I will not be giving publish feedback off-site on this book as I couldn't finish it.

DNF @ 57%

Some of this book was good, but it really needs to be edited as the constant stream of thought made for a distracting read. I honestly kept questioning the point of it. As the main character road around on his bike. Like did we need to hear everything? Leave us some mystery just like the real life killers, please.

The pace is a little off but I quite enjoyed it for the most part. If your interested in a stream-of-consciousness, social commentary from the perspective of a guy on a killing spree, then you might like this.

I was a fan of this.
I would buy a copy of this for my shelf.

The perspective of this book was spot on and engaging and you felt the paranoia.

My only complaint was the format of this.

“Schroeder” by Neal Cassidy is the perfect example of why I try not to DNF a book. We open to Schroeder preparing for his killing spree. He has perfectly mapped out his day to the hour and we are taken along for the bicycle ride. When I started this book I sarcastically said it should be renamed “A Day in the Life of a Psychopath”. It is a hard, heart shattering look at society as a whole. I cannot say you will enjoy this book, but I think you should read it.

This book is deep. Really deep. Like, what's wrong with Neal Cassidy, the author, deep. And, make your stomach sick, deep. So deep that the word deep is starting to not look like itself.

Don't read this book if you don't like horror, or gruesome murders, or detailed descriptions of heinous crimes.

But DO read this book if you're looking for an opportunity to get inside the mind of a killer, of someone who has been pushed to the brink of no remorse. DO read this book if you've ever, even for a second, sympathized with the killer on trial, wondering what happened to him to make him so hurt, so angry, so dark and cynical, and so aggressive. DO read this book if you're jaded and think that nothing you see, read, or hear can shock you anymore. DO read this book if you're naive, if your life has been so innocent and so fortunate that you can't even imagine the hardships that some people have to endure to make it through. If you've never experienced or can't even fathom the level of bullying that would make someone lose hope, turn sadistic, and psychotically murder a number of people, READ THIS BOOK.

If you have the same feelings as me as you progress through the book, you'll likely start out with a low rating. Then you'll continue reading because you're curious. Then the end will start to give you some sense and peace. But when it's all over, you'll really get an understanding of why it all happened. And it'll feel deep.

Thank you netgalley and m & s publishing! for this e copy.

I thought it was well written unique, written in a way i haven't read before, we get look into the perspective of the killer in a consciousness form of writing. very interesting!
i enjoyed it.

This is a dark look at a spree killer, from his perspective. Written in a stream-of-consciousness form, it is a unique novel about how this young man goes on this horrible spree. It is not for the faint of heart, but is it a unique read.

Not for me, but I think it could be for someone. People tend to think that just because you don't enjoy no one will enjoy it, but that's just not true. This will definitely be someone's favorite, just not mine.

Fun is to be had following a young man on a bloody murderous rampage around town

Neal Cassidy’s Schroeder is one of those novels which is guaranteed to split critics. Some readers might well believe they have uncovered a cult classic in the making, with deep insightful commentary on abuse and how killers are created rather than born. Others might take it as a gruesome mess heading from kill to kill will little explanation or justification. I sit somewhere in the middle, and even though I found Schroeder somewhat frustrating could appreciate the ambition of Neal Cassidy, even if some parts of the book misfired, others caught me momentarily off-guard with their sheer levels of brutality.

If you do not enjoy novels written entirely within a stream of consciousness then avoid Schroeder like the plague as it will totally do your head in. Even at a briefish 256 pages this internal chaotic swirl rambled all over the place, is disjointed, has sentences which were much too long, and by page fifty my patience was sorely tested. Even if this style is deliberate, it did not make for a particularly relaxing reading experience, with the unnamed narrator veering from conversationally musing about one aspect of his day-to-day existence, before picking up the pace with his next murder.

Some places have listed Schroeder as Literary Fiction and if you view Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as such, then this book surely also fits the bill. Please take this next comment as a serious trigger warning; there are a couple of astonishingly graphic kill scenes. In the worst, a guy gets both his arms and legs hacked off by an axe, whilst the act is playing out the cool as you like narrator is musing why it takes six strokes to hack of a certain limb, but seven for another. This astonishingly violent death plays out in almost documentary style and rivals anything you might find in the most gruesome Splatterpunk novel. Meanwhile the internal monologue of the narrator is uncomfortable jarring and clinically calm as he goes about his bloody business. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Schroeder has a minimalist plot with too much being left unexplained for my taste, including a thirty page diary style epilogue which failed to sit comfortably within the context of the rest of the novel and seemed slightly tacked on. I will be interested how many readers found this ending satisfying and whether they felt it justified the atrocities carried out by the main character across the previous pages.

The story opens with a young man (who we might as well call Schroeder) about to start a killing spree, spread entirely over one day, across the city he lives in. No explanation is given on how he has chosen the people he kills (also frustrating). He carries out the deed by cycling around town and picking his victims off one by one, whilst contemplating what to have for dinner. Even if it seems implausible that a geeky young man might commit such atrocities, in reality gun crime and high school shootings in America are so commonplace, these actions are not so far-fetched.

Schroeder is an uneasy blend of visceral horror, social commentary and the ripple effect long term trauma has on individuals. The narrator is presented as neither a hero or anti-hero and whilst he does not earn our sympathy in the same way the cracking up of Michael Douglas in Falling Down does, this loner remains a mass of contradictions which deserves exploration in more depth. Is extreme violence ever justified? Your answer may change depending on how you take to the final thirty pages, which certainly frame the story in a new light.

Not a fan of the endless stream-of-consciousness narration. It was interesting at first to be in the mind of a killer, but also kind of boring at times as outside of killing you’re subjected to all his thoughts and opinions on mundane things.

The diary entries at the end felt so over the top and fake. The endless trauma and abuse, everyone laughing at him and his mom- ya it’s not realistic.

Anyways, if you want to get into the mind of a murderer, there are many other books out there that actually keep the plot and narrative interesting and less plodding.

Thank you anyways to the author, NetGalley, and M&S Publishing for a copy.

I attempted to read this novel a week or so ago and to be perfectly honest it is not for me what so ever. The writing, the content and the pace...it just didn't do it for me. I simply could not finish. This may be for certain readers but unfortunately I'm not one of them.

Started off being something fresh and different, ended up being a complete snooze.

I quickly became uninterested in the "stream of consciousness" writing style. It felt like it was all just filler and things were only actually happening to move the plot along in about 10% of the book. I enjoyed the journal entries at the end more than anything else. I overall wouldn't recommend this book to anyone I know, unfortunately. Premise sounded like it would be an interesting character study of a Norman Bates-esque main character, but the whole thing was just flat and blahhhhhh.

[I was provided a review copy of this book via Netgalley.]

Unfortunately, this book really wasn't my cup of tea. I found the overall premise to be interesting, but it was not written in a fulfilling way. The prose was simply too dense and run-on to be engaging, and it was a genuine difficulty to get through the book.

It almost felt like the author was trying to mimic the style of similar books (like American Psycho) but the execution of the style and overall premise didn't work out. Instead of deftly exploring the themes of trauma and abuse, it felt like exploitation for shock value, almost like, "See? See? There's so much awful stuff here!"

Many thanks to NetGalley and M&S Publishing for the free e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I have often wondered what happens in the mind of a killer to make them snap and murder another person. We live now in a society where there is extensive coverage of school shooters, killers, serial killers and monsters. Little is mentioned of the mental state of the killer until later in the trial process. This story gets you into the head of the killer and his POV.

This is a well written and interesting take on a tormented, abused man who snapped one day and rode his bike around shooting people on a murderous rampage. Its emotional, fast paced, and written in a stream of conscience from Schroeder's POV. Dark but a wonderful read!

This book was okay. While it was written well it just wasn't what I wanted it to be so I had a hard time getting into it. I would definitely give other books by this author a shot but this one was just not for me.

Stupid, pretentious, an absolute waste of time.

Oh my god, this book annoyed the shit out of me. It was chock full of long winding sentences, endless commas and barely any paragraph breaks. If that was the extent of it, I would have been fine but nooo, it has to be boring too.

Schroeder (or Schrodinger, as I keep calling him in my head) follows a guy who is about to commit a mass shooting. He kills several black guys, a woman, some white guy and some other people I can't remember because I was skimming at that point. We don't know why he's killing these people, we get the sense that they've done something wrong to him so we're supposed to be perplexed as we await our answers.

These people that Schroeder killed are in different locations but somehow he's able to gun them all down without law enforcement or anyone catching on to him. Sure, whatever, I've suspended my disbelief for less.

In the end, we are shown Schrodinger's diary since he was ten or something all the way to his adulthood. In each entry, we are treated to the worst case of abuse a person and their mother can go through. We are told Schrodinger was abused as a kid by his father, his mother was abused by his father, he was bullied by the richest boy in his class and all the teachers could do nothing because his bully was rich. Schrodinger was bullied from the age of ten to I think he's in his twenties now. I went from sympathetic to rolling my eyes at every entry detailing the abuse from his childhood bully, his co-workers, some teenage girl and basically everybody he ever comes in contact. Also, his mother was SAed by her boss which is bad, of course but you can tell the author is just making a checklist of every trauma these people can go through. Eventually, his mother died and that's when Schneider decides he's had enough of being bullied by the entire town basically and decides to kill everyone.

As someone who has been the victim of CSA and parental abuse and even suffered mild bullying growing up, I call bullshit on Schroeder's trauma porn of a diary.

Do I think people don't go through awful shit like this in lives? Of course, I don't but not to the extent it was written in this book. I hate when authors write characters as trauma personified instead of a fully fledged person.

Schroeder's mother is not a developed character. She's a sad woman whose entire existence is to justify Schroeder's rampage. We don't get to see her personality, her happy moments, her resilience. All we see is trauma, trauma, trauma. So much trauma it actually becomes annoying.

Schrodinger himself has no personality other than the fact that he has faced horrendous abuse all of his life. He doesn't have friends, he doesn't have interests or crushes or favorite things. All he has is an abusive father, an abused mother, a bully that torments him all the way into adulthood, co-workers who beat and make fun of him, customers who laugh at his abuse and two people who don't torture him, I guess.

It's essential that Schroeder be the most traumatized person to ever been to traumatized ever. That way the author doesn't have to do much mental gymnastics when trying to convince you that this particular mass shooting is not like the other girls.

In theory, I would have loved to see this explored. Bad people getting their comeuppance and all that. I mean I'm not American but I still saluted Luigi. The problem is this isn't really explored. This people are killed in gruesome ways and we only get a footnote to explain why. It feels very lazy to me.

I wanted to give this three stars to be kind but I'm starting to realize I actually hated every moment I read it. Well, not every moment. The beginning hooked me, I won't lie.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Also #freeLuigi

I started reading this book with great expectations, but it soon fell apart and I lost interest - I felt like I was trudging along getting nowhere. I'm sure other people will enjoy this book but it wasn't for me.

I tried to get into this story but it just didn't hold my attention. I'm sure it's a wonderful novel but just not for me.

Neal Cassidy’s latest novel, SCHROEDER, sets out to immerse readers in the turbulent mind of its antihero, offering an (overly?) ambitious exploration of emotion and experience through a stream-of-consciousness narrative. In short, the genre of the book is horror, but it's fed to the reader with a literary twist. While this choice was bold and initially caught my interest when requesting ARCs on NetGalley, it also unfortunately created a barrier to fully connecting with the story. The fragmented, often chaotic narration made it difficult to engage with the plot or the characters. Perhaps that's the point, but the disconnect from the story made it difficult to want to pick up the book.

The story itself doesn’t hold many surprises beyond what’s outlined in the synopsis, and the events regrettably unfold pretty predictably,;aside from one decent twist near the end. While I think Cassidy captures the characters’ frenzied inner worlds effectively, the writing style felt overly dramatic and self-indulgent at times. It was hard to focus on what was actually happening in the story when my attention was so intentionally drawn to the way in which those events are told to us.

Also, the plot leans heavily into exaggeration, with a series of dramatic events that stretch believability, to say the least. This is a horror novel, so I'm a little more willing to accept some out-of-this world explanations, but something about the ending didn't work here. I think that these events might have felt more authentic with a smaller or more isolated backdrop and less fantastical storytelling. But even so, I will say that the first-person narration - albeit self-indulgent - manages to convey the intensity of the characters’ emotions, adding a sense of authenticity to their personal experiences, even when the overall narrative feels implausible. While the novel has its moments of brilliance, its narrative style makes it hard to fully connect with or care about the story’s resolution at all.

Thank you to the publisher via NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of SCHROEDER by Neal Cassidy to review. All thoughts are my own and are not influenced by any third party.

“I don't understand how human beings can be so mean and awful to one another and cause such pain with such disregard. I can't continue riding some wave wherever it takes me, and it's heartbreaking to me that this is where we are, alone in a dark corner of the universe, and this is how we treat our own kind.”

You know what? HELL YEAH!

3.75 stars. Grotesque and at first very confusing “Schroeder” is a tale of what might at first seem as pure horror but as it unfolds we slowly come to see it as more of a revenge story. I wouldn’t call the protagonist exactly evil, sure he’s far from a good person, he’s a sadistic killer and yet as the story unfolds you understand him, understand his actions and slowly start to lose all sympathy for his victims. Schroeder isn’t a villain, rather a person who was driven to his breaking point by the people around him. Killers are not born, they’re made, carefully and methodically crafted by the society around them.