Gabriel Squailia’s Viscera Is the Weirdest Book You’ll Read This Year

It begins with Ashlan Ley living peacefully in the forest, until two drug addict cultists, Jassa and Rafe, disembowel her and take her entrails (how’s that for a bad beginning?). Granted, it only slows Ashlan down a little, as she’s unkillable, but it’s definitely an inconvenience. Once she comes to, she’s contracted by a small golem named Hollis Runt, who wants her to help him kill The Puppeteer, a mad scientist bent on murdering the entire world using Runt’s alchemical enchantments. As she’s sworn to do no harm, Runt conscripts Rafe and Jassa as muscle, also collecting a deranged thaumaturge named Tana Equinox and her undead bear along the way. This motley crew makes its way to Eth, a city wracked by magical earthquakes and endless battles over the calcified organs of gods, to put an end to The Puppeteer’s menace. But the city holds more than just deranged cults and murderers, and the five will have to come to terms with their pasts if they hope to reach the Puppeteer’s catacombs.
As that plot summary can attest, Squailia (Dead Boys) is an imaginative writer. Viscera approaches its world with a skewed eye; it’s not every municipality that prizes innards more than all the riches on earth, where a god’s adrenal gland produces a hyper-addictive drug used by most citizens. But even some of the more conventional elements are given a grisly twist. One scene flitters between body horror and black comedy, as Ashlan tucks Hollis away in her stomach cavity and must keep her organs from growing back while he’s in there. It’s tense, but also oddly, disturbingly hilarious—Hollis runs out of space and has to keep careful hold of his weapon inside her. It’s the kind of book where a necrophage cult gets offended when people say they eat the bodies of the dead, because of course they only take the marrow. It’s absurd, bloody, violent, and wonderful, all at once.

Yet beneath the mounds of adrenochrome-injecting bugs, habitual disembowelment, and gigantic god innards,Viscera is a strange sort of character study, with emotion that belies its bizarre visuals and grim sword-and-sorcery tone. Squailia treats these outsized personalities as real people; their insane actions come from a real place. Knowing their pasts colors their present actions, giving us reasons why these morally ambiguous antiheroes wound up that way. There’s also a thoughtful consideration of nonbinary gender and queer themes; Squailia not only creates real, concrete nonbinary characters and gives them agency; she makes their struggles integral to the world and the people that live in it. Who they are, and why, hinges on the prejudice they face in the world. It’s a great example of inclusive fiction, and I hope more people follow Squailia’s example.
This book is dark, weird, and wonderfully human, and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s far and away the weirdest, most original thing you will read this year, and Gabriel Squailia gives it heart that matches its entrails beat-for-beat.