Motel Styx by Michelle Von Eschen and Jonathan Butcher

This is an extreme horror book, although I might say for all the social and consumeristic behavior that is laid out at its worst, it could be called Splatterpunk.

Necrophilia is legalized and not only do hotels start catering to these morbid desires, but an entire system for distributing the bodies is put in place. It just gets more disturbing from there; wet rooms, fetishes, and morbid acts that make you want to wash your brain after reading. All of this is embedded in a very intriguing story about a man trying to find his wife’s body after she signed a release for her corpse to be used by necrophiliacs at Motel Styx.

The theme of grief and the inability to let go after death is explored. The strange ways that lifelessness somehow allows people to live in ways they couldn’t in the living world. And a mystery unfolds as the main character encounters a deranged (even more deranged than most) guest that he fears and the story of what happened to his wife begins to be revealed.

This book is extreme and such a good read. It is driven by the story and the gore and morbid descriptions just add to the plausibility of the plot. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel.