Some Books Chris Read

The Flesh Inherent - Perry Meester

I received a review copy of this novel via BookSirens in exchange for an honest review.

The Flesh Inherent

I only heard about this book because I saw another author I follow talking about it on Bluesky, thus proving that the best marketing your book can possibly have is other people talking about how good it is. Here's what this is all about:

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN FROM THE SKY

On a hot summer night, something enormous screams down from the sky and pierces into the desert not far from the small town of Farchapel. The stories that trickle back from the crater are strange indeed—those who find it and return claim to be forever changed, transformed into the better, ideal versions of themselves they've always wished to achieve.

Jamie, recent mysterious visitor in town, is a man on the run, all too eager to escape his current form no matter the cost. Sidney, local drunk, would rather face a hole in the ground than the things he’s done. As the two men venture into the desert canyons in search of their better selves, they soon discover that what hides there is much more terrible—and eager to lure them in.

"Weird west horror" is a genre that I absolutely love aesthetically but that I haven't read much of, and the same goes for science-fantasy, so this scratched a very specific itch for me. I didn't know what to expect at all going into it - I'm unfamiliar with Meester's writing and with the word that Ghoulish Books publish - but I was hooked immediately.

Meester's prose is mostly solid. At its best it's incredibly confident and evocative, doing a lot in a very short space of time. The stark, violent world we're presented with feels alive and real, the horrors crawling out of the crater in the night feel genuinely alien and unsettling, and the violence hits hard and fast. We're dropped into an ongoing situation and given no idea what's going on initially but it doesn't matter, as Meester drip feeds us exactly what we need to know when we know it with not a word wasted.

Where it falters is in the character work; I sometimes struggled to figure out whether we were in Jamie or Sidney's head, though that had more to do with some clumsy jumping between viewpoints in a couple of the action scenes rather than anything else.

What really shines here is Meester's portrayal of the messiness of queer relationships. Any story about queer relationships in a western setting is obviously going to draw comparisons to Annie Proulx but I think it's apt here, specifically in the way that sex is portrayed on the page. The sex scenes have the same urgent, aggressive intimacy as the earlier scenes of violence. That's something that I've always admired about Proulx's writing, and it's some of the strongest work in The Flesh Inherent, too.

This is a really solid debut novella, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more of Meester's writing in the future.

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