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Coyote
“Bodies are weird. I think that’s why I’ve always been so drawn to them. Watching them, that is. You could call it a curiosity but I get how it looks. My eyes are always drawn to skin and the way you can see the calcified pistons and joints bend and protrude, testing the limits of the soft nets protecting them. I see the jocks stretching in their muscle shirts and think about how their shoulder blades look like vultures’ wings trying to tear free.”
In my imagination I’ve killed myself a thousand times. Others, too. Max Restaino’s Coyote is a drawn out dissociative episode, a lucid nightmare of disemboweled animals, nosebleeds, vomit, tapeworms, soundtracked to System of a Down. Kids play video games, trespass into abandoned homes, chat in the school cafeteria, but the universe disintegrates slowly, leeches crawling underneath skin, every moment pierced by a knife.
Coyote is raw, enveloping violence. -- Danielle Chelosky
In my imagination I’ve killed myself a thousand times. Others, too. Max Restaino’s Coyote is a drawn out dissociative episode, a lucid nightmare of disemboweled animals, nosebleeds, vomit, tapeworms, soundtracked to System of a Down. Kids play video games, trespass into abandoned homes, chat in the school cafeteria, but the universe disintegrates slowly, leeches crawling underneath skin, every moment pierced by a knife.
Coyote is raw, enveloping violence. -- Danielle Chelosky
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Published January 1, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 5, 2026
I’ve been consuming a ton of horror novels, comics, and movies my entire life and not much scares me these days, but Coyote by Max Restaino is frightening.
It’s a fever dream of a novel about a young man battling his dark thoughts and his slow unraveling. Coyote motifs run rampant through this slim book. It somehow walks the fine line between being tender, vulnerable, and scary. There’s an honesty here that really make it shine and the climax is so intense I had to take a breather.
Highly highly recommended if you like horror/transgressive fiction.
It’s a fever dream of a novel about a young man battling his dark thoughts and his slow unraveling. Coyote motifs run rampant through this slim book. It somehow walks the fine line between being tender, vulnerable, and scary. There’s an honesty here that really make it shine and the climax is so intense I had to take a breather.
Highly highly recommended if you like horror/transgressive fiction.
February 10, 2024
For a myriad of reasons not limited to depression and anxiety, most reading has been more challenging for me lately. My brain disconnects from my eyes and they go tripping down the paragraphs, words hurtling by in a blur. I often find myself lying at the bottoms of pages wondering how I got here.
In its brief moments, Coyote wouldn't allow me to do this. It slapped me in the face. Held my head steady. Made me watch. Time was still a blur. I often turned my head in one place only to find myself lost in another but this time it felt right. Really good stuff.
In its brief moments, Coyote wouldn't allow me to do this. It slapped me in the face. Held my head steady. Made me watch. Time was still a blur. I often turned my head in one place only to find myself lost in another but this time it felt right. Really good stuff.
December 6, 2024
“There’s a horrible type of freedom only Nothing can provide.”
July 11, 2025
"I am evaporating; a mist of blankness overwhelming every if and was. There's a horrible type of freedom only Nothing can provide."
Coyote is a hyper violent novel. Reading it felt like being punched repeatedly in the face. It's one of those books that just slams you with this ultra specific feeling, a needling sort of anxiousness that buries itself behind your eyes, a worry that bubbles under your skin - there's no one word that can accurately describe what a strange, unusual, completely horrible sort of dread this book leaves you feeling. It's a highly atmospheric experience, akin to experiencing your first ever drug trip, you're left in awe, sitting back and thinking, oh shit, this is real. It's just... It's magical, it's that feeling right before the peak of the high hits you. It's a really, really good book, a deeply uncomfortable one, sure, but, God, this thing is just incredible.
As weird as it may sound to say about a book such as this, there's something so delicate, so vulnerable and intimate about how this story is told. There's a real authenticity here, an openness, like all the best novels it's something that's completely obsessive, and totally self-indulgent. What starts off as a pretty ordinary story, quickly sinks into a bottomless pit of despair, depravity and cruelty. Coyote may just be the literary equivalent of driving right into oncoming traffic, you know something horrible is coming, but you can't stop, you're now committed right to the bitter end. It's pure atmosphere, it's vibes and vivid, disgusting imagery, and it's all very fragmented and hallucinatory, Coyote had me wanting to peel my skin off and scoop out my eyes. It's the most kaleidoscopic of nightmares.
I will never not be grateful for books like Coyote. Because it's books like this that are the most daring, it's books like this that challenge us to truly face down something distressing. Coyote is so unafraid, it's unafraid to display the sickening, horrifying nature of being human. This is an excellent piece of modern horror, it offers us a wonderfully bleak, beautifully depressing little nightmare. It's tempting to say that this is mental illness as horror, it's tempting to say that this isn't even horror at all, that its actually an exploration of true fear, of the anxieties of growing up, of the brutality that is Suburban America. Perhaps it's none of these things, and it's just the origins of a serial killer. But, all that feels too simple, the truth is, Coyote is something that I can't quite grasp, at least not in a single reading.
Whatever this may actually be, because I believe there's many, many ways to interpret this thing, it's a fascinating experience, and a deeply lonely one, too.
"Bodies are weird. I think that's why I've always been so drawn to them. Watching them, that is. You could call it a curiosity but I get how it looks. My eyes are always drown to skin and the way you can see the calcified pistons and joints bend and protrude, testing the limits of the soft nets protecting them. I see the jocks stretching in their muscle shirts and think about how their shoulder blades look like vultures' wings trying to tear free."
Coyote is a hyper violent novel. Reading it felt like being punched repeatedly in the face. It's one of those books that just slams you with this ultra specific feeling, a needling sort of anxiousness that buries itself behind your eyes, a worry that bubbles under your skin - there's no one word that can accurately describe what a strange, unusual, completely horrible sort of dread this book leaves you feeling. It's a highly atmospheric experience, akin to experiencing your first ever drug trip, you're left in awe, sitting back and thinking, oh shit, this is real. It's just... It's magical, it's that feeling right before the peak of the high hits you. It's a really, really good book, a deeply uncomfortable one, sure, but, God, this thing is just incredible.
As weird as it may sound to say about a book such as this, there's something so delicate, so vulnerable and intimate about how this story is told. There's a real authenticity here, an openness, like all the best novels it's something that's completely obsessive, and totally self-indulgent. What starts off as a pretty ordinary story, quickly sinks into a bottomless pit of despair, depravity and cruelty. Coyote may just be the literary equivalent of driving right into oncoming traffic, you know something horrible is coming, but you can't stop, you're now committed right to the bitter end. It's pure atmosphere, it's vibes and vivid, disgusting imagery, and it's all very fragmented and hallucinatory, Coyote had me wanting to peel my skin off and scoop out my eyes. It's the most kaleidoscopic of nightmares.
"A gagging sweet odor sweeps past us on a cold breeze and I wonder if Dylan hasn't been lying about his hobbies. He calls it The Coyote House. Apparently, it had grown from the corpse of one. I feel like I've been here before. I ask Dylan if there's a door. I know there isn't but I ask anyway. Dylan says "Not yet, but it isn't finished" according to him, the blighted ribs bared through the coyote's decaying husk formed the frame of the structure and the corpse of each child buried here fed into its walls."
I will never not be grateful for books like Coyote. Because it's books like this that are the most daring, it's books like this that challenge us to truly face down something distressing. Coyote is so unafraid, it's unafraid to display the sickening, horrifying nature of being human. This is an excellent piece of modern horror, it offers us a wonderfully bleak, beautifully depressing little nightmare. It's tempting to say that this is mental illness as horror, it's tempting to say that this isn't even horror at all, that its actually an exploration of true fear, of the anxieties of growing up, of the brutality that is Suburban America. Perhaps it's none of these things, and it's just the origins of a serial killer. But, all that feels too simple, the truth is, Coyote is something that I can't quite grasp, at least not in a single reading.
Whatever this may actually be, because I believe there's many, many ways to interpret this thing, it's a fascinating experience, and a deeply lonely one, too.
"Bodies are weird. I think that's why I've always been so drawn to them. Watching them, that is. You could call it a curiosity but I get how it looks. My eyes are always drown to skin and the way you can see the calcified pistons and joints bend and protrude, testing the limits of the soft nets protecting them. I see the jocks stretching in their muscle shirts and think about how their shoulder blades look like vultures' wings trying to tear free."
May 24, 2024
This book is fragmentary and neverending, the way our bad dreams so often are. By giving us Coyote, Max Restaino has really brought something dreadful to the table.
February 13, 2024
Love the graphics, not so enthusiastic about the writing.
January 28, 2024
If this didn't already feel perfectly prescribed to my very particular taste in horror/mental illness, Max went and hit me with a Media Play reference 💀
May 16, 2024
I've lived in Georgia for 3/4 of my life now, but we moved around quite a bit when I was younger, including three pretty formative years (8-10) in what was, at least at the time, a pretty rural part of Colorado. We had a barn. The roads around our house weren't paved. Every part of the natural world seemed unconquerably enormous, and every piece of civilization we patronized seemed almost laughably small. It was a beautiful, magical place to grow up. Our house was on what people call horse property - flat, treeless, littered with cactus and yucca and fire ant hills - and there was virtually nothing but that for the vast, vistal miles between our front deck and the rocky mountains. Except at night. When the coyotes came out.
You could only ever see their eyes, glowing yellow in the dark, but you could pretty much always see them, as they were usually just staring, unnervingly, right at the large front windows of our living room. They knew we were in there, I'm sure, and my younger brother and I loved to stare back out at them; see how many we could count until we got scared and turned away. It was probably maddening for them - how close we were. How little actually separated us. How little we'd be able to do, if they ever figured out how to breach that last flimsy, transparent barrier and get all the way inside.
You could interpret the title of Max Restaino's chilling debut novella Coyote any number of ways, but it definitely brought back strong memories for me of the genuine article. The book's protagonist, Jim, is an insidiously relatable headcase - narrating his own formative journey from troubled child to inchoate creep to self-actualized menace - and the intrusive thoughts of extreme violence that plague him throughout his life feel increasingly like predators, hungrily eyeing the doors and windows of his fragile mind, scratching up the wood and glass until sooner or later, something cracks.
The delicacy with which Restaino handles this progression is perhaps Coyote's greatest strength. Where so many tales of mental instability airdrop us straight into a killer's dank torture pit, or else reduce his very existence to some singular, lightning strike trauma or outsizedly heinous, almost supernatural capacity for evil, Restaino brings us along slowly - meticulously - showing how a chance, latenight viewing of a gruesome slasher film (the titular Coyote) ushered a way-too-young Jim into an early obsession with the grim verboten. How that obsession in turn led him to the likeminded friendships and outre proclivities of his spongily absorbent adolescence, dabbling in altered states and making his own disturbing films (calling to mind modern alienation nightmares like Michael Haneke's Benny's Video and Antonio Campos's Afterschool), both of which serve to further blur the lines between his increasingly invasive fantasies and his stillborn reality. And finally, how that wayward youth subtly evolved into a detached, desensitized adulthood defined by the search for access to yet darker realms. Whether he's perusing the hard-R section of the video store, gazing intently at a piece of fresh roadkill, or exploring the abandoned home of a child murderer, Jim never feels like a born monster. He's more like a sleeper agent - activated by that first obsessional image that tapped into his own dangerous hardwiring. And ever since, those intrusive thoughts have just kept clawing outside the door.
From there, the pull of the void is strong; gravitational; exponential. Indeed, this strange inertia is heavily underscored by Restaino's deft, often repulsively poetic use of nature imagery throughout - the cyclical intertwining of damp earth and vegetal growth, carnivores, scavengers, and saprophytes, blood and meat. Killers aren't born, he seems to say softly, almost plaintively. Rather they grow, naturally, perhaps even inevitably, along the way. But even in its rawest, and most savage moments, this is a book of profound, and brave empathy. Restaino neither defends his subject, nor condemns him. Like all the best spelunkers of the abyss, he just wants to shine a little light; to better understand those mean, yellow eyes staring out at us from the dark, sniffing around for a way inside. Because in the end, there's nothing supernatural, or even all that unnatural about Jim's descent into his terrifying final form. You get the sense he did the best he could, for as long as he could, to keep the coyotes at bay. But he saw something he wasn't supposed to see, and it made him feel something he didn't expect to feel, and like the wild animals that populate his environment, his videos, and his deteriorating mind, he's ultimately just following his instincts. For him to chase that feeling to the bitter end - it's the most natural thing in the world.
You could only ever see their eyes, glowing yellow in the dark, but you could pretty much always see them, as they were usually just staring, unnervingly, right at the large front windows of our living room. They knew we were in there, I'm sure, and my younger brother and I loved to stare back out at them; see how many we could count until we got scared and turned away. It was probably maddening for them - how close we were. How little actually separated us. How little we'd be able to do, if they ever figured out how to breach that last flimsy, transparent barrier and get all the way inside.
You could interpret the title of Max Restaino's chilling debut novella Coyote any number of ways, but it definitely brought back strong memories for me of the genuine article. The book's protagonist, Jim, is an insidiously relatable headcase - narrating his own formative journey from troubled child to inchoate creep to self-actualized menace - and the intrusive thoughts of extreme violence that plague him throughout his life feel increasingly like predators, hungrily eyeing the doors and windows of his fragile mind, scratching up the wood and glass until sooner or later, something cracks.
The delicacy with which Restaino handles this progression is perhaps Coyote's greatest strength. Where so many tales of mental instability airdrop us straight into a killer's dank torture pit, or else reduce his very existence to some singular, lightning strike trauma or outsizedly heinous, almost supernatural capacity for evil, Restaino brings us along slowly - meticulously - showing how a chance, latenight viewing of a gruesome slasher film (the titular Coyote) ushered a way-too-young Jim into an early obsession with the grim verboten. How that obsession in turn led him to the likeminded friendships and outre proclivities of his spongily absorbent adolescence, dabbling in altered states and making his own disturbing films (calling to mind modern alienation nightmares like Michael Haneke's Benny's Video and Antonio Campos's Afterschool), both of which serve to further blur the lines between his increasingly invasive fantasies and his stillborn reality. And finally, how that wayward youth subtly evolved into a detached, desensitized adulthood defined by the search for access to yet darker realms. Whether he's perusing the hard-R section of the video store, gazing intently at a piece of fresh roadkill, or exploring the abandoned home of a child murderer, Jim never feels like a born monster. He's more like a sleeper agent - activated by that first obsessional image that tapped into his own dangerous hardwiring. And ever since, those intrusive thoughts have just kept clawing outside the door.
From there, the pull of the void is strong; gravitational; exponential. Indeed, this strange inertia is heavily underscored by Restaino's deft, often repulsively poetic use of nature imagery throughout - the cyclical intertwining of damp earth and vegetal growth, carnivores, scavengers, and saprophytes, blood and meat. Killers aren't born, he seems to say softly, almost plaintively. Rather they grow, naturally, perhaps even inevitably, along the way. But even in its rawest, and most savage moments, this is a book of profound, and brave empathy. Restaino neither defends his subject, nor condemns him. Like all the best spelunkers of the abyss, he just wants to shine a little light; to better understand those mean, yellow eyes staring out at us from the dark, sniffing around for a way inside. Because in the end, there's nothing supernatural, or even all that unnatural about Jim's descent into his terrifying final form. You get the sense he did the best he could, for as long as he could, to keep the coyotes at bay. But he saw something he wasn't supposed to see, and it made him feel something he didn't expect to feel, and like the wild animals that populate his environment, his videos, and his deteriorating mind, he's ultimately just following his instincts. For him to chase that feeling to the bitter end - it's the most natural thing in the world.
September 8, 2024
This book hit for me in a very specific way that I can only compare to playing Bloodborne for the first time without going online for walk-through’s. It’s like, when you first start reading this book, it’s all atmosphere and s**t is real mysterious and esoteric. But as the story progresses, it’s like, oh s**t, maybe that whole dream sequence with the slug-leeches was not a dream sequence, maybe that’s actually what happened. And you keep reading and it’s getting really uncomfortable because you know something is coming to a head, that at some point the narrator is going to kill his mom or one of his friends or all of his friends. So in that sense, it’s also like popping some Molly and it’s that feeling right before the jig hits you, and you know it’s about to hit, so you’re all anxious and s**t. And things get progressively more fever-dream like, and yet, I think some of it is actually happening. So I’m not saying at all that the book shares any themes with Bloodborne, just how it gradually gets more unhinged and f**ked up and gross as it goes on. Yo the illustrations were crazy too. I would be reading and then I would get to an illustration and be like “oh s**t, what the f**k is that? Is that a silhouette of a person burying somebody in the background?”
I want to bother the author of this book with hella questions too, like, “what is that on the cover exactly?” and “did he really kill both his boas or was that just in his mind?” and “why don’t they have no police in this town?” but I’mma just chill.
I want to bother the author of this book with hella questions too, like, “what is that on the cover exactly?” and “did he really kill both his boas or was that just in his mind?” and “why don’t they have no police in this town?” but I’mma just chill.
August 2, 2026
“Once upon a time there was a boy with several names.”
A fairy tale of alienation. A boy points at a crayoned circle of wax and says, “That’s me”. We watch Restaino’s narrator’s dissolve from childhood through a fog-ridden adolescence where, “I wondered what the birds would look like through a camera’s eye instead of mine.” A SONY camcorder pointed into darkness. A hammer in a bloodied hand. Reality and fantasy begin to mirror each other. Triggered by an unfathomable image in a horror VHS called COYOTE, violence blooms in every room. Blocky images on a TV screen of bone and brain matter. A coyote rotting on a tarmac road. Punctured by Steven Purtill’s elegant illustrations, Restaino’s novel is poetic and visually beautiful, evoking that shiver of fear when you can’t quite recognise what you’re seeing on the screen, or what is happening inside your own head. Am I being invaded by another dimension or, as Anna in Possession (1981) posits, the maker of my own evil? Slugs eating through a corpse. A body dissolving into black bile. A smile rushes across his ruined face as, slowly, he realises, “I’m becoming a part of something very special.”
A fairy tale of alienation. A boy points at a crayoned circle of wax and says, “That’s me”. We watch Restaino’s narrator’s dissolve from childhood through a fog-ridden adolescence where, “I wondered what the birds would look like through a camera’s eye instead of mine.” A SONY camcorder pointed into darkness. A hammer in a bloodied hand. Reality and fantasy begin to mirror each other. Triggered by an unfathomable image in a horror VHS called COYOTE, violence blooms in every room. Blocky images on a TV screen of bone and brain matter. A coyote rotting on a tarmac road. Punctured by Steven Purtill’s elegant illustrations, Restaino’s novel is poetic and visually beautiful, evoking that shiver of fear when you can’t quite recognise what you’re seeing on the screen, or what is happening inside your own head. Am I being invaded by another dimension or, as Anna in Possession (1981) posits, the maker of my own evil? Slugs eating through a corpse. A body dissolving into black bile. A smile rushes across his ruined face as, slowly, he realises, “I’m becoming a part of something very special.”
February 21, 2024
Excellent modern horror nightmare, that’s written visceral and violent and gripping. A plagued mind slipping away, ancient horrors of the lovecraftian variety mixed with slasher gore. Nostalgia and familiarity, comfort for a few pages and then you’re killed back into an unending nightmare. Graphic and bleak but so propulsive and descriptive. A new voice in modern horror is born.
February 8, 2024
Dark and slimy and fun, elegaic and curt, has that “guy looking back and crazy shit that happened” quality i love in books
February 14, 2024
A fascinating horror experience that speaks to the anxieties of growing up and the darkness that lurks in us. It describes a type of suburbia in America that I know well...I very much recommend!
September 13, 2024
This is definitely not for everyone, a very strange and bleak semi-coming-of-age horror story. Gory, weird, video obsessed teenage obsession story. I went in blind and was so rewarded.
October 9, 2024
A book that demands to be read in one sitting for full effect and there are zero excuses (It's less than 70 pages) to not abide. Nothing less than the effect of a mallet to the head.
January 28, 2024
This book reminds me of why I initially liked David Lynch - the beauty underneath, the slime, the fractals, the decay - has a beauty of its own.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews