This book opens with a content warning, so I want to start my review by letting you know that this book contains a lot of things, including gore, infanticide, rape, violence against animals… and a lot of people doing mushrooms.

Moonflow is about Sarah, a trans-woman, who finds herself in financial trouble when her mushroom harvest fails to please, so she agrees to go into the Pamago Forest, led by a blithely stupid male guide, Andy, to find the elusive Kings Breakfast mushroom. It’s meant to open your mind and make you understand the whole universe, but the heart of the woods is dangerous, with rumours of cults, missing hikers and ancient, slumbering evil.

Moonflow is the debut novel from Bitter Karella, and is a queer, psychedelic, splatterpunk horror trip.

I didn’t really enjoy or get into this book. I love a horror story and I think splatterpunk can be really fun because it’s just so wild and over the top. In this book, we have some things that really push the boat out in a hilarious, dark way. There’s mushrooms, ancient gods, Lesbian cults, gore, raccoons… sometimes you’re not sure, or at least I wasn’t, what was real and if the characters were just on a weird trip. I think this wildness was quite fun and it’s a trip. I also liked that the author could be quite lyrical and descriptive, and I think the pacing was nicely done as well. So if you’re looking for some weird, wild, psychedelic reading, this one might be for you.

For me, there were a few things that just made it a hard read for me. Firstly, the mean-spirited nature of the writing. The author calls people fat and/or frumpy, especially the main character, many times. (The word “fat” is used 26 times according to a Goodreads account called simply Maria) Overweight bodies are described in grotesque terms. The book is in third person, so it’s the narrator doing it, the authors voice. It seems like they think it’s a moral failing and it feels really jarring at times, like they hate their lead character. I think they hate all their characters though, because they all seem to be cartoonishly bad people. Most of the men are white supremacist cops who say and do ridiculously tropey things. It makes them silly and annoying, rather than scary. The lesbians in the cult are all Terfs who scream “phallic alec” all the time, ad infinitum. Andy, the male guide, is blithely stupid and sexist, and it gets really annoying very quickly. It’s not funny or clever, it’s just mean, like a high school bully describing people.

The second thing is that the author feels oddly obsessed with genitalia. Splatterpunk often likes to push the boat out a bit and try to be shocking, and talking about sex can be part of this (we’re looking at you, Richard Laymon), but this feels different. It feels cringey and fetishistic. It adds nothing to the story, it’s just the author fantasizing about and yet disgusted by, the human body. The word “breasts” is used, again thank to Maria, 43 times. It feels a bit teenage boy fan fiction-y and it’s not clever. It’s not edgy. There’s a lot of sexual content here or content about sexuality, sexual organs, and it’s tiring.

I think if you like weird fiction, splatterpunk and psychedelic writing, it could be a real trip. For me, it was just all too mean spirited and heavy handed. But I will say that Bitter Karella can write.

Quick final note: the content warning at the start talks about animal death. It’s not spoiling anything to let you know that the cat lives and is fine.

Read It If: you’ve ever had a bad trip or are into taking mushrooms. An acquired taste and not for me.

Thank you to HBG Canada for the ARC of this book for review.