Rot

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?

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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.

"Rot" is a story that is filled with dread. It's to the point that it is practically oozing out of every page. Coiley does a wonderful job at setting up a simple premise that not only stays intriguing during the short read, but manages to conjure up a pretty sinister atmosphere. Following a nurse as she deals with her physical ailments, during the pandemic, which happens to occur during a snowstorm, we get to feel the isolation that this woman is feeling, brining back all-too familiar memories of what it was like during quarantine. As the story progresses, you don't quite know what is around the next corner, what Coiley is going to do next, which made for a very fun read. There is a lot of lead-up to the conclusion of this tale, which I was hoping was going to be a Big Bang, but rather fizzled. I just felt like the last chapter needed a bit more time to get to, maybe one more chapter to set the scene before we got to the conclusion. It's not a bad ending by any means, it just felt a tad underdeveloped. That being said, overall, this book was a ton of fun to read, and I honestly had such a good time with it. The cover is what drew me to request this book, and I was hoping that it would live up to the great cover, and I'm very happy to report that you can judge this book by it's cover and know that it's well worth the read.

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.