A big thank you to M & S Publishing and NetGalley for getting a chance to read this ebook!

I was drawn in by the cover, mystery surrounding who was "Schroeder" and really fell in love with how the chapters were laid out and the non-linear story telling. The unique and clever stream of consciousness writing style can really captivate your attention, and immerse you inside the mind of the main character. However, it's definitely not a nice place to be what-so-ever. Bleak, disturbed and had me audibly gasping at horrific scenes during my read. I tried to understand their intentions and actions, however with the shocking and graphic scenes of violence, it was really hard to see through the emotions I felt for those people they encountered that day... the ending, however, gives you the full perspective.

Read at your own risk, and check your trigger warnings PLEASE! ⚠️

Loved this!! I am a huge fan of stream of consciousness novels, especially when it comes to dark themes and questions about redemption. Brilliant stuff

This is my first read by Neal Cassidy.
The cover and synopsis are what drew me to request and read this book, In the beginning, it seems to start as a normal day for him; then his plan comes to light with each incident. You literally take a "ride" with Schroeder for the entire day.
All of which makes sense when nearing the end of the book.
It is very descriptive in conveying Schroeder's feelings and the surprise when his victims realize what is about to happen.
Schroeder definitely had a troubled past. One can begin to assume this by his meticulous habits and his "planned day".
You don't uncover why he is troubled until the end; which brought EVERYTHING to light!
For me, it was engaging, but difficult to read at the same time. Yes, it has TRIGGERS, but at times the writing didn't seem to convey what the author wanted us to feel or understand. I had to re-read certain parts 2-3 times to grasp it and understand what was, or about to happen.
I needed full closure at the end, given the circumstances. Yes, one can assume, but I don't like to assume in this instance, I needed to know exactly.
All in all 3 star read for me.
If you are not a reader that can read/listen to books with triggers, this is NOT for you.

I had a tough time with this one. While I really enjoy the stream-of-consciousness story, it was a bit hard to follow. I had to go back at a few points to make sure I understood.

Even though the main character is a murderer, somehow we still see what makes him a victim. I struggled to attach myself to any characters.

2.5 stars

This is the first book I have read that utilized stream of consciousness thought narration. It reads similar to watch a one shot film. It was extremely hard to put down because I was fully immersed into the mind of Schroeder during his day of redemption and wanted to know how it would all end. As the story progresses through his checklist things become very violent and graphic. Schroeder obviously has lived a harsh cruel life which the details of are not revealed until the end when the reader is given his diary from a young age. It is a very intense, sad read shedding light on the unpleasant nature of how we treat each other. After reading you are going to want to do something nice for someone.

All too often, we willingly turn a blind eye to the causes and motives of those who do horrible things. Allegedly in the name of "not glamorizing" the perpetrators, our willful ignorance plays a large part in what causes these horrific cycles of violence to continue. To not only know the reasons but also be in the thoughts and experiences of someone in that state of mind is incredibly valuable when it comes to understanding and stopping these things from happening. Without understanding, there can't ever be change. So, while it is fiction, SCHROEDER is an incredibly valuable work.

This book wrecked me!! Truly wrecked me! I went from literally almost throwing up to sobbing uncontrollably at the end reading those diary entries. Oh my gosh this was absolutely heartbreaking. I had a feeling where this book was headed but I didn’t know exactly what was going on and I wasn’t expecting the killings to go down like they did! I was shocked! This was shocking and disgusting and bleak and yet so insightful and even had some beautiful moments. It was maybe a little bit too stream of consciousness/wordy but that’s more a me thing. This one is going to stick with me for a long time.

Summary: A young man begins a seemingly normal day before exacting a precisely planned killing spree.
Genre: Thriller, horror, suspense
Content Warnings: domestic violence, bullying, anger, violence, suicide, misogyny, gore, body horror

Thank you to Netgalley for providing this digital book. I am leaving this review voluntarily.
‘Schroeder’ is about a character that suffers from what, at first glance, appears to be severe mundanity. But it isn’t until I read more that I realized he is in so much pain that it’s stopped computing in his brain. As the story progresses, you sense a deep buried trauma that is often muted and bogged down by the character’s observations of extraneous details, which I took as a sign of high anxiety and dread. He is curiously civic minded, a passive presence in the world, apart from when he is killing. He is front and center, willingly, for perhaps the first time in his life.

I was confused throughout the first few chapters; it was difficult to grasp Schroeder’s motivations. I felt the random flashbacks were not helpful to the present timeline. On the other hand, some of the internal tirades were helpful in illustrating Schroeder’s mindset, but not the reason for it. We wouldn’t find out until later.

I sensed a deep disconnect between Schroeder and the world. He floats in it, desperate for some sense of importance of his lived experiences, but he ultimately invalidates himself with their pedestrian role in the story. He lacks self-confidence and doubts himself. He presents an unforgiving notation of a mediocre life, something he is quite aware of but strains to ignore, especially in the face of what he knows to be a grand reckoning: the murders he commits and the consequences he knows are coming and does nothing to avoid. This showed me that he doesn’t intend to be around for the consequences, a clever but simple foreshadowing.

Overall, this is a story of a man racing from his sudden realization that he will die, his horrible actions muted in his mind by his observations of simple details or even his more existential musings that display an effort to shrug off blame. The beginning of the book felt shaky but steadied after the second chapter. The writing was more at east in the killer’s headspace. I thought it was an interesting and creative inclusion on the author’s part of the letters per chapter that spelled out Schroeder’s name, and the accompanying word definitions that the reader would find later in the chapter, like easter eggs.

Ultimately, the killer’s existential questions are ones we all have and that haunt our more vulnerable moments. They are common queries often paralleled by gory and unsettling imagery that help the reader understand why this character is the way he is. Coupled with the diary entries at the end, we see a sad and broken person. It’s easy to lose sight, amid all the insistent observations of mediocrity, of the killer’s main objective: to find his targets and kill them. At the end, I wondered, maybe he was right. Amid the muddied extraneous details, the reader almost looks forward to the killings, in a sense coming to accept the heinous as justified.

I think ‘Schroeder’ is good for people who seek stream of consciousness, existential musings and don’t mind some murder. It won’t vibe with people who need well-structured syntax and are a bit squeamish.

I will not be giving publish feedback off-site on this book as I couldn't finish it.

DNF @ 57%

Some of this book was good, but it really needs to be edited as the constant stream of thought made for a distracting read. I honestly kept questioning the point of it. As the main character road around on his bike. Like did we need to hear everything? Leave us some mystery just like the real life killers, please.

The pace is a little off but I quite enjoyed it for the most part. If your interested in a stream-of-consciousness, social commentary from the perspective of a guy on a killing spree, then you might like this.

I was a fan of this.
I would buy a copy of this for my shelf.

The perspective of this book was spot on and engaging and you felt the paranoia.

My only complaint was the format of this.

“Schroeder” by Neal Cassidy is the perfect example of why I try not to DNF a book. We open to Schroeder preparing for his killing spree. He has perfectly mapped out his day to the hour and we are taken along for the bicycle ride. When I started this book I sarcastically said it should be renamed “A Day in the Life of a Psychopath”. It is a hard, heart shattering look at society as a whole. I cannot say you will enjoy this book, but I think you should read it.

This book is deep. Really deep. Like, what's wrong with Neal Cassidy, the author, deep. And, make your stomach sick, deep. So deep that the word deep is starting to not look like itself.

Don't read this book if you don't like horror, or gruesome murders, or detailed descriptions of heinous crimes.

But DO read this book if you're looking for an opportunity to get inside the mind of a killer, of someone who has been pushed to the brink of no remorse. DO read this book if you've ever, even for a second, sympathized with the killer on trial, wondering what happened to him to make him so hurt, so angry, so dark and cynical, and so aggressive. DO read this book if you're jaded and think that nothing you see, read, or hear can shock you anymore. DO read this book if you're naive, if your life has been so innocent and so fortunate that you can't even imagine the hardships that some people have to endure to make it through. If you've never experienced or can't even fathom the level of bullying that would make someone lose hope, turn sadistic, and psychotically murder a number of people, READ THIS BOOK.

If you have the same feelings as me as you progress through the book, you'll likely start out with a low rating. Then you'll continue reading because you're curious. Then the end will start to give you some sense and peace. But when it's all over, you'll really get an understanding of why it all happened. And it'll feel deep.

Thank you netgalley and m & s publishing! for this e copy.

I thought it was well written unique, written in a way i haven't read before, we get look into the perspective of the killer in a consciousness form of writing. very interesting!
i enjoyed it.

This is a dark look at a spree killer, from his perspective. Written in a stream-of-consciousness form, it is a unique novel about how this young man goes on this horrible spree. It is not for the faint of heart, but is it a unique read.

Not for me, but I think it could be for someone. People tend to think that just because you don't enjoy no one will enjoy it, but that's just not true. This will definitely be someone's favorite, just not mine.

Fun is to be had following a young man on a bloody murderous rampage around town

Neal Cassidy’s Schroeder is one of those novels which is guaranteed to split critics. Some readers might well believe they have uncovered a cult classic in the making, with deep insightful commentary on abuse and how killers are created rather than born. Others might take it as a gruesome mess heading from kill to kill will little explanation or justification. I sit somewhere in the middle, and even though I found Schroeder somewhat frustrating could appreciate the ambition of Neal Cassidy, even if some parts of the book misfired, others caught me momentarily off-guard with their sheer levels of brutality.

If you do not enjoy novels written entirely within a stream of consciousness then avoid Schroeder like the plague as it will totally do your head in. Even at a briefish 256 pages this internal chaotic swirl rambled all over the place, is disjointed, has sentences which were much too long, and by page fifty my patience was sorely tested. Even if this style is deliberate, it did not make for a particularly relaxing reading experience, with the unnamed narrator veering from conversationally musing about one aspect of his day-to-day existence, before picking up the pace with his next murder.

Some places have listed Schroeder as Literary Fiction and if you view Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as such, then this book surely also fits the bill. Please take this next comment as a serious trigger warning; there are a couple of astonishingly graphic kill scenes. In the worst, a guy gets both his arms and legs hacked off by an axe, whilst the act is playing out the cool as you like narrator is musing why it takes six strokes to hack of a certain limb, but seven for another. This astonishingly violent death plays out in almost documentary style and rivals anything you might find in the most gruesome Splatterpunk novel. Meanwhile the internal monologue of the narrator is uncomfortable jarring and clinically calm as he goes about his bloody business. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Schroeder has a minimalist plot with too much being left unexplained for my taste, including a thirty page diary style epilogue which failed to sit comfortably within the context of the rest of the novel and seemed slightly tacked on. I will be interested how many readers found this ending satisfying and whether they felt it justified the atrocities carried out by the main character across the previous pages.

The story opens with a young man (who we might as well call Schroeder) about to start a killing spree, spread entirely over one day, across the city he lives in. No explanation is given on how he has chosen the people he kills (also frustrating). He carries out the deed by cycling around town and picking his victims off one by one, whilst contemplating what to have for dinner. Even if it seems implausible that a geeky young man might commit such atrocities, in reality gun crime and high school shootings in America are so commonplace, these actions are not so far-fetched.

Schroeder is an uneasy blend of visceral horror, social commentary and the ripple effect long term trauma has on individuals. The narrator is presented as neither a hero or anti-hero and whilst he does not earn our sympathy in the same way the cracking up of Michael Douglas in Falling Down does, this loner remains a mass of contradictions which deserves exploration in more depth. Is extreme violence ever justified? Your answer may change depending on how you take to the final thirty pages, which certainly frame the story in a new light.

Not a fan of the endless stream-of-consciousness narration. It was interesting at first to be in the mind of a killer, but also kind of boring at times as outside of killing you’re subjected to all his thoughts and opinions on mundane things.

The diary entries at the end felt so over the top and fake. The endless trauma and abuse, everyone laughing at him and his mom- ya it’s not realistic.

Anyways, if you want to get into the mind of a murderer, there are many other books out there that actually keep the plot and narrative interesting and less plodding.

Thank you anyways to the author, NetGalley, and M&S Publishing for a copy.

I attempted to read this novel a week or so ago and to be perfectly honest it is not for me what so ever. The writing, the content and the pace...it just didn't do it for me. I simply could not finish. This may be for certain readers but unfortunately I'm not one of them.

Started off being something fresh and different, ended up being a complete snooze.

I quickly became uninterested in the "stream of consciousness" writing style. It felt like it was all just filler and things were only actually happening to move the plot along in about 10% of the book. I enjoyed the journal entries at the end more than anything else. I overall wouldn't recommend this book to anyone I know, unfortunately. Premise sounded like it would be an interesting character study of a Norman Bates-esque main character, but the whole thing was just flat and blahhhhhh.