S. Craig Zahler

When you die, your body turns into a squid. You're a squid now, not a kid now! Do crime, when you die, you become a squid and if you're a crime squid you don't go to squid heaven. Also people can resurrect you against your consent and your robot meat body can be puppeted by an AI. No thanks.

Don't worry, everyone explodes into robot blood and guts when the evil AI is defeated, even the good people.

Also if you kill anyone, even accidentally, you don't go to squid heaven. Sure glad animals don't factor into this, it's only human lives that matter.

Very racist, very homophobic, and iirc a little fatphobic, very... It's a mess. I don't need to explain this.

I wasn't comfortable with homosexuality being compared to incest, or with the "fake bisexual" plot point. It really was stupid. Also this book drops slurs a lot, literally just says "dyke" a bunch for no reason other than Craig is clearly a fucking nasty man.

0.5 stars.… (meer)

At present I may be sniffling a little bit after having finished this beautiful story about a very special anomalous little boy named Hug Chickenpenny.

As the novel opened I was getting a Basket Case (1982 horror) vibe but the story took a very different turn and instead turned into a Tim Burton-esque fantasy. As we follow Hug from his entry into this world as a misshapen, terrifying newborn orphan (his mother dies in childbirth), and watch him through trials and tribulations, we grow ever closer to, and fonder of, him by the day.

Having read previous books by Zahler, and knowing nothing about it but the name, this book was totally unexpected. It was such a profoundly emotional portrait of the titular character that I'm still a little bit perplexed by its intimacy and the lack of sheer physical brutality that I kept expecting from my prior experiences.

Hug Chickenpenny is still a brutal book but in a very different way. It could quite easily be read as a parable about how society treats people who are different and it works seamlessly on that level. But for me, it was more personal; I felt genuinely close to Hug, and protective of him, and this book will stay with me for a very long time.… (meer)