Set against a gloomy, bleak winter season in the UK, our unnamed narrator spends her time at home, hiding away from people and reality. Dealing with the aftermath of the covid pandemic, losing her job, and the end of an abusive relationship, she descends in to isolation and slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) begins to grow paranoid and lose herself.

The chapters read like scrawled, detailed diary entries which read somewhat juvenile and felt like an odd choice at first but I grew to like it. I think Coiley likely chose first-person point of view to really let readers in on the narrator’s state of mind in the advanced stage of alcoholism. In addition, the way that this was written really did add to that feeling of fear and desperation that the narrator felt.

It’s repetitive in parts but still proves to be a tense and uncomfortable twist on a woman suffering from mental illness and trauma, and descending in to alcohol-related psychosis. While I enjoyed the content I found the execution to lack a little and the title to be misleading—did I miss said rotting? Still, this novella made for a quick read.

Thank you Book Guild and NetGalley for the digital copy in exchange for an honest review! Available 07/28/2024

The ONLY reason this is a 3 star read for me as opposed to 4, is because I PERSONALLY don’t enjoy first person povs.
I enjoyed the book a lot, though. It was a short and easy read, and then gore was very well written and great, very immersive.

Surprisingly good. I expected a fun read, from the premise, but this was excellent. I highly recommend this book to horror lovers.

Eh this was quite disappointing for me. I will say the pacing and imagery does an excellent job creating a disorienting, horror-movie style experience but that’s about it. The prose isn’t great, the underlying themes are unexplored, and a lot that should be inferred or felt is just stated outright. For example, the abuse dynamic. Were explicitly told a few times the main character experienced an abusive marriage. There’s a gesture to its impact on her when she says, as explicitly as possible, that her history of domestic violence made her accustomed to the feeling of having her hair pulled. If instead the marriage history was revealed to us slowly over time, or more subtly through her reaction to the possession, and the possession itself was shaped more fully by the dynamics of abuse, it could be an interesting exploration of domestic violence and its legacy through the possession trope. Because it’s just stated explicitly three times, none of that thematic potential is realized. This is true of all the themes, from lockdown to mental health crises to alcoholism. Very underwhelming.

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.

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?

#rot @richardcoiley #netgalley #bookreviewer #ad #thebookguild #horror #shortstory #generalfiction

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.