Four best friends, one music festival, and a cooler filled with human organs: this summer is about to get gory.
Jennifer’s Body fans will clamor for this new sapphic horror standalone from New York Times bestselling author Kayla Cottingham.
Three years ago, the melting of arctic permafrost released a pathogen of unknown origin into the atmosphere, causing a small percentage of people to undergo a transformation that became known as the Hollowing. Those impacted slowly became intolerant to normal food and were only able to gain sustenance by consuming the flesh of other human beings. Those who went without flesh quickly became feral, turning on their friends and family. However, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat that would satisfy the hunger of those impacted by the Hollowing. As a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal, albeit with lasting fear and distrust for the people they’d pejoratively dubbed ghouls.
Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine are all ghouls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before their graduation they decided to attend a musical festival in the desert. They have a cooler filled with hard seltzers and SynFlesh and are ready to party.
But on the first night of the festival Val goes feral, and ends up killing and eating a boy. As other festival guests start disappearing around them the girls soon discover someone is drugging ghouls and making them feral. And if they can’t figure out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is safe.
Okay, trying something new while taking notes on this book during my listen. I’m going to copy down my notes:
trans, bi, Sapphic, cannibalism, gore, pandemic, road trip
diversity checklist
by joshua tree! been there!
virtue signaling (specifying the blm stickers and pride stickers, pride parade, VERY certain to make sure that we know). is it virtue signaling? would i think the same if the specified stickers were for bands? it’s a choice, they are actively telling me about just how DIVERSE they are, it feels forced
underage drinking
slur-adjacent (ghoul)
narrator doing indian accent
racism/homophobia adjacent (hollow… ist?)
illness
mexican accent
vomit, purging
spanish. pronunciation is good
drugging/drugs
called it that eli drugged her. like roofies but for people who go into a cannibal frenzy
nazis (far right extremists)
racism
Cole is gonna be evil
Naming Generalized Anxiety Disorder
body horror
okay cole is a ghoul, and also antivaxxy a bit??? quarantines being government conspiracy?? ir covering up the extensiveness being backed by corporate greed. menthexis in addition could be an analogue to snake oil cures for covid
“I HELD.MY PHONE ALOFT LIKE I’D SEEN PEOPLE DO IN OLD MOVIES” IM SORRY??????
separatism attitude, trying to make an equivalent of “black towns”
“hooking her thumb toward…” is such a common phrase
cole is in the hoodie. the evil hoodie
now it seems like a red herring
no he totally knows
human supremacists
wait is raj supposed to be AUSTRALIAN
real word! pulled from way before
One-liners
Okay, that’s the baseline of my initial thoughts while listening to it.
I know diversity is important and to come right out and say it really lives no room for interpretation for people who wish to deny such things, but it always feels so shoehorned the way that this author is doing it. It’s like…
“My friend Brick, who is black and nonbinary, waved their pride flag as they jostled their hair, which was in box braids today.”
vs
“Brick waved a pride flag, the flag swaying like their box braids. They grinned and wiped sweat from their dark skin, laughing.”
The first one is basically what you are reading in this book and the second is something I would have preferred. It’s a very label-first book. Sometimes it tries to be more subtle but the subtlety is… debatable.
I am happy it is a diverse book aimed at teens and young adults. Such things are important! However, please, for fuck’s sake, when I read people’s labels first or they are just their labels… it kinda feels like I’m playing Bingo.
Next… well, this is something I’ve begun to notice… I don’t really feel good about listening to readers do things in accents. Well… let me rephrase. Specifically ethnic accents. Is it supposed to be more immersive that they do? Because I have this weird panic like, huh? Aren’t we not supposed to do heavy ethnic accents? Ethnic being… anyone not white. I heard it in Middle of the Night and here I was seriously wondering about Raj’s accent. In the beginning I thought, is she putting on an Indian accent? And then later, I wondered, wait, is he supposed to be Australian?
Next is the comparisons. You can interpret the Hollowing as an obvious analogue to Covid, draw a line between Menthexis (I listened to the book, okay, I didn’t see the spelling) being either the vaccine or snake oil. Devil’s advocate being the Covid vaccine, and the interpretation of the government forcing people to do as they please in a sort of martial-law bid for control, and the vaccine making people worse. The flip is Menthexis being snake oil, claiming to better people suffering from the Hollowing while actually afflicting them with something much, much worse; this would also pair well with the rather flippant disregard that people who are supposed to be monitoring symptoms and outbreaks and all that treat their charges, and the post-Covid attitude. The sensation of overbearing government control and corporate control of information is very relatable in this sense.
The other major thing is… the Hollowing is just a symptom of being queer. This is reflected most in Zoey’s family, where once she “comes out”, she is sent to a troubled youth facility and they keep their distance from her. (The youth facility being where they keep Hollowed people.) The feeling of alienation and loneliness, as well as queer fellowship. The feeling of being different, a “monster”. The way that it feels like there is not enough support, not where one needs it, and the blatant disregard and anger that people have towards the Hollow people. There’s also the “humane” self-protection devices (“child-safe tasers” are the most notable) meant to control a child’s “urges” towards their new Hollow reality. And, let’s remember the pejorative “ghoul” vs the reclaimed ghoul. Queer vs queer.
And why not, let’s use it as an analogue for racial discrimination as well. Literally the attempt to divide society based on who is and is not a ghoul. That came up.
There is a lot here that I’m certain proper essays can be written on, and it would be relatively easy… okay, sorry, very easy, they really give you a lot to work with… and the hook of Cooler Zombies and Pining Gays is pretty good. I would recommend this to any queer teen out there looking to get into horror. It’s what I think of as Horror Lite. You got body horror (people get real long and they unhinge their jaws n stuff. Lots of cannibalism but a lot of internal struggle REALLY telling the reader, this was bad, wow that was bad) and Drugs are Mentioned, but… honestly, yeah. I’d say 13+ is a good bar to set. Little cursing can titillate the younger folks, but it isn’t much different from a Halloween special with more blood.
