A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper

TL;DR: This one messed with my brain in the best way.
Source: NetGalley – Thank you to the publisher!!

Plot: Carmen partakes of a play that acts as a drug, and her world is impacted and unraveled along the way.
Characters: A delightful mess of love and paranoia. I’m still deciding what happened here!
Setting: The setting here is not really important unless we’re talking about the play, in which case you are pleasantly bewildered the whole time.
Horror: This is slow and creepy, it makes it deeply uncomfortable and the payoff at the end for me was perfection.

Summary:

Euphoria meets Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke in this latest novel by the Bram Stoker Award–winning author Hailey Piper, following a couple whose search to spice up their sex life leads them down a path of madness.

A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.

As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.

Thoughts:

I saw a little buzz around this book, not a lot but just enough to spike my interest. It was pitched as weird, queer, and kinky but also mind bending in it’s horror. I didn’t actually think it was going to work so well for me because that’s a lot of stuff to do well. But color me yellow – it was fantastic.

This is the type of horror that creeps, but not too much. We know it’s happening, and it’s not till a little over half way that you realize just how much it’s wiggled it’s way in and how much it’s messed up the main character and our experience in the book. Who was guilty, we don’t know? Was anyone guilty? Was this truly the work of malevolent forces? I am genuinely haunted by the answer and keep turning the ending over in my head to try and find it.

It’s not perfect, there are holes and I think some hanging threads that need a bit tightening but for me and my enjoyment this is one of the best ‘cosmic horror’ books I’ve read. Big bonuses for the queer and kink work as well, which really added a fascinating element to the story and the characters. All and all a fantastic read.