I’m conflicted about this story. I started down this path with Feed The Pig, which I absolutely loved, and I was so intrigued that I immediately used a credit on the title when I found it on Audible.
Body Horror has always fascinated me, and mixed in with the Silent Hill, Little Nightmares, and Fear & Hunger aesthetics styled world I was hooked.
The overall writing is very good, albeit with a few grammatical issues but those are overshadowed by the authors clear talent at writing viscerally gut wrenching gore/horror scenes. it’s clear they put a lot of passion into this book.

I want to start by saying that out of the issues I have within the book there is one that stands out above all else, and ties into a lot of the other qualms I had while listening; Jess.
Jess is the girlfriend of the main Protagonist, Nick.
Thats pretty much all we ever learn about her, other than she is beautiful, remarkably forgiving and sweet, wants kids, and doesn’t like living in the country.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Jess is the reason for this entire story. Early on, she suffers a miscarriage and falls into a deep depression, eventually cumulating in her and Nick taking their own lives. I wish this critical turning point had more time to develop, fleshing out a very complex series of events and character development rather than just glossing over it.
The story highlights their clear codependency as Nick is thrust into a nightmarish version of Purgatory, his sole drive being to find his love and escape.
He does horrendous things to get to her and she is witness to many of them-and seemingly the driving force behind all of them, but never once seems to falter in her faith in him, even being intimate with him RIGHT AFTER being rescued from a ‘breeding cult’ where she had JUST witnessed another woman about to be forcibly impregnated. (theoretically, at least- the woman was described as being in her 50s so either the all-male cult doesn’t fully grasp female biology or there’s something supernatural allowing for the pregnancies to occur. I like the first option better because it’s funnier.)
This, I thought, would be a bigger moment for Jess to be developed further. She had suffered through a miscarriage that ended up driving her to suicide… it would have been the perfect moment to explore that trauma of pregnancy and the implications being taken by a cult with those intentions meant to her.

The more the story progressed the more Nick reminded me of Ash from the Evil Dead series; Isekai’d into a cruel and nightmarish world that slowly, inexplicably turns him into an unhinged action movie cool guy complete with edgelord-adjacent one liners and inner dialogue.
We never hear about what the job was that Nick was laid off from at the begining of the story but by the end of everything he endures you’d think he was a Navy Seal.

The other minor gripe I have is the fact that if anyone is fat in this universe you bet your bottom dollar they will be an evil deviant and two out of three times they like jorkin it.
I only mention this because it sits in stark contrast to the canonically “pretty” Nick and his canonically beautiful girlfriend.
The character Pudge seemed at first like a really cool concept; a man who carved out his own existence and purpose in a cruel world. Yeah, he’s unhinged, but who wouldn’t be after long enough on the Black Farm.
My main gripe here is why did the author feel the need to insert Pudge cranking it. I thought maybe it was to harken back to the abuse Nick suffered under Muck but that trauma is basically never explored again other than a few ‘man that was a rough time’ and ‘Muck was a bad dude’ moments Nick has.
Assault against men is just so rarely explored in a serious manner in media I thought the author would use it as a opportunity for character development rather than sort of just as a tool to make the readers uncomfortable, which is how it ended up feeling to me.
Again, this ties back into the part where Jess and and Nick get intimate- could have been a great moment to explore the many intricacies of intimacy post assault.

Wow, this is a lot.
I’ll end on these notes-
will I listen to the next book? yes, absolutely. this world is too interesting to not and I think the author is a genuinely talented writer.
am I asking for every horror story to be an introspective essay on trauma? No… maybe? I just hope that extreme trauma gets handled with the realism it deserves in my horror.

Feed The Pig was an AMAZING short story- perfect, no notes. I can understand how hard it would be to develop that into a full novel, and I admire the hell out of the author for doing it.