Sister, Maiden, Monster

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I enjoyed this author's writing style. I thought she did a beautiful job at keeping this story flowing and holding my attention. This is viciously twisted and gory, and at times you will think, "Did I really just read that?" It is also incredibly creative and intriguing since Snyder delves into depths of depravity that most authors wouldn't be comfortable delving in to. I love it for its uniqueness and just how much fun it ends up being to read.

Absolutely recommended for readers of the cosmic and gloriously horrific.”―Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling author Erin is the first we encounter. A disease has broken out, stabbing everyone with familiar pangs of nostalgia to the corona virus. The infection sounds pretty similar, but if you are infected, you are guaranteed a trip to the hospital, if not the morgue. The disease is called PVG or ‘Polymorphic Viral Gastoencephalsiits,’ and the side effects are simply disturbing. It’s enough to keep your skin and brains from ulcerating. It’s enough to keep your nose from rotting off.” Told in three parts, Lucy A. Snyder's Sister, Maiden, Monster charts of the course of mankind's transformation through the eyes of three women. The first, Erin, is a recently engaged desktop support specialist who finds her body all but decimated by PVG. Savannah is a sex worker turned serial killer cannibal for the elder gods. Mareva's body, meanwhile, is prone to producing benign tumors even at the best of times, but in the face of PVG is forced to reconcile with even more horrific possibilities.A virus tears across the globe, transforming its victims in nightmarish ways. As the world collapses, dark forces drive a small group of women together.

Erin, once quiet and closeted, acquires an appetite for a woman and her brain. Why does forbidden fruit taste so good? Getting inside the minds of the three women was also fascinating, but they were often dark places to be. Fair warning, this book is not for the faint of heart. Full of visceral horror with gory descriptions that can hedge into the downright disgusting, I can see that being a contentious issue for some readers, not to mention there’s also a fair amount of sexual content—very messy, very graphic sexual content. My company was headed that direction, too, but it would be another week at least. Universal Corporate Computing had a huge, stegosaurian bureaucracy; change came slowly, when it came at all. It’s hard to go into further plot details without spoilers, but it’s no spoiler to say that this is not one of the‘what did I just read’ variety of books, but more the ‘what am I reading’ variety, because it’s hard to fully suspend disbelief for the entirety of the three narratives. They sound a little like they could be the voice of one woman as she evolves, but perhaps that’s the point. Absolutely recommended for readers of the cosmic and gloriously horrific.” — Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling authorReminiscent of early Poppy Z. Brite, razor-edged and compulsively readable, Sister, Maiden, Monster is the pandemic kink-thriller I didn’t know I needed.” Oh, and did I mention that in addition to Erin's milder diet of things like bananas and applesauce, she eats brains? And as she reminds readers, the worst part is that she's a contagious Type Three, so until she's no longer contagious... things are even worse. She tells her partner that they can no longer live together because it's not safe. She has to try to find a lodging of her own that will accept her. You’re early! I was expecting the robbery around six thirty.” His tone was cheerful but held an anxious edge. Unflinchingly gory, fast-paced and full of disasters both expected and unexpected — every twist is earned and becomes another piece in this intricate puzzle that begins as a medical mystery. I promise you have never read another cosmic horror like this. It’s impossible to look away as we witness everything it takes to end this world in full, intimate detail.”

Holy cannoli, I don't know what I was expecting when I opened this book, but I was in for a WILD ride. SISTER, MAIDEN, MONSTER is a post-pandemic, apocalyptic, eldritch horror festival of a book. Think COVID but way... way... WAY... worse. The body horror and slow, creeping sense of your own physical self slowly turning against you is mesmerizing in the best and worst ways possible. Inspired by her Bram Stoker Award-winning story “Magdala Amygdala,” Lucy A. Snyder delivers a cosmic tale about the planet’s disastrous transformation… and what we become after. A hideously gory, kink-fueled, feminist cosmic horror apocalypse novel that should be on the top of everyone’s reading list.” — Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Ararat and Road of Bones Savannah , a professional BDSM switch, discovers a new turn-on: committing brutal murders for her eldritch masters. First things first, thank you so much to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for an ARC of this incredibly enthralling read!Visceral, gory, and deliciously unhinged, Sister, Maiden, Monster is a fast-paced, disturbingly relatable pandemic horror that I absolutely devoured and never wanted to end.

Award-winning horror writer Lucy A. Snyder unleashes "Sister, Maiden, Monster" onto readers with great aplomb. Folks who prefer their fiction without any plagues or pandemics may want to steer clear of this novel, and even though I myself am in the camp that prefers not to read about pandemics, Snyder's writing and storytelling are magnificent, so I made an exception. The novel begins with a pandemic--not Covid-19, but something called PVG, or Polymorphic viral gastroencephalities. It has spread all over the world at roughly the same time in major cities, and the medical powers-that-be aren't sure about a Patient Zero, if one exists. PVG has also emerged after the previous 'coronavirus years,' so the landscape imagined here includes a world in which something worse comes after our current pandemic. The protagonist, Erin, and her boyfriend Gregory, are celebrating their anniversary a bit early. She becomes extremely ill not long after, and things take a turn for the worse. I also appreciated the book’s takes on things like corruption in the modern medical industry, the dangers and death tolls of capitalism, the dystopian nature of modern American society, ( “Be a productive member of the economy or die; it’s the American way”), the government’s ineptitude and vast mishandling of pandemics in general, the medical and sociological discrimination against woman, even a slight nod towards racism and its perpetuation in subtle ways by white women, but it did feel like this novel wasn’t sure what statements it wanted to make and attempted to make all of them at once. I loved the way the breakdown of society is seen through three unique female voices (Erin, Savannah and Mareva) whom are all impacted in hugely different ways from the early days in hospital isolation to later periods when the government have snipers on building roofs looking for anything suspicious. This was Covid-19 multiplied by a thousand as the three try to survive (or embrace) the virus which is destined to change humanity.

Nope, I’m a burglar.” I hung my keys on one of the brass hooks below our coupon-plastered corkboard. “I’m here to steal your Funko Pops.”