Herculine by Grace Byron

TL;DR: This writing style just didn’t work for me, it was exhausting.
Source: NetGalley – Thank you to the publisher!!

Plot: Our narrator gets trapped in a cult, demons abound!
Characters: A bit of a mess to be honest. We’re so trapped in our narrator that no one felt real.
Setting: The cult’s headquarters felt nice but we got so little of it I can’t attest to it well.
Horror: I was so exhausted by the narration style the horror didn’t even hit.

Summary:

Herculine’s narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob story—conversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exes—but she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse. Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any she’s ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.

The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narrator’s growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isn’t quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own.

While trying to untangle the commune’s many mysteries, the narrator contends with disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast. And before long, she discovers that her demons have followed her. And this time, they won’t be letting her go.

Thoughts:

I love cults, I love horror, and queer things so this seemed like it’d be right up my street. Initially I was very into it, and I was even getting on with the style. However, after about 20% I lost the flow. This is incredibly stream of consciousness. Our narrator takes us from her home to work, into the past frequently, and eventually to an ex’s ‘commune’ where she has collected various trans girls for a true community. Now, that sounds great but when I tell you I couldn’t keep up with where and what we doing half the time, I wish I was exaggerating.

There was frequent jumping through time here, from one paragraph to another, from one sentence to another, we’d jump into a flashback and then to the present. For me that was deeply disorienting. I’d loose pace and place with where we were and I’d even frequently forget which characters were which. I can see how this could be meant to give off some of that horror that the story promises. Being lost in yourself or outside of yourself perhaps? Unfortunately it didn’t hit that way. Instead I felt numb with exhaustion by the time the horror began to kick off, and I didn’t enjoy anything that was happening.

For me it was a miss, and I’m so disappointed. I had hoped for much more but the writing style just didn’t click for me at all. If you don’t mind this type of exhausting structure, give this a try. But if you’re someone who needs a bit more of clear times and settings? This could be a skip.