Invaginies

by Joe Koch

The Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author returns with a new collection of literary horror and weird fiction that glitters with startling prose and tortured souls. 

Invaginies is an invasion, it is a perception that is bodily and transcendent creating holes, paths, or pockets of alternate truth—and not always voluntary—enlightenment.

Every line sings and strikes like grotesque poetry of the possessed. With 17 disturbing tales exploring plagues, possessions, gender & corruption, set in apocalyptic eras not much unlike our own, Joe Koch brings the terrors of a postmodern world into vivid focus. 

Haunting and beautiful, Koch takes their place among the great names of the weird like Brian Evenson, exploring the queer perspective in horror as Billy Martin and Clive Barker, and contemporary rising voice, Eric LaRocca.

Literary prose meets the grotesque in this collection of stories to galvanize lovers of horror and weird fiction. With a growing cult audience, this collection is sure to shoot to the top of readers' tbr piles.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, LGBT, Queer, Thriller

222 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 25, 2024

About the author

Joe Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Their books include THE WINGSPAN OF SEVERED HANDS, CONVULSIVE, INVAGINIES, and THE COUVADE, which received a Shirley Jackson Award nomination in 2019. His short fiction appears in numerous publications such as Vastarien, Southwest Review, PseudoPod, Children of the New Flesh, and The Book of Queer Saints. Joe also co-edited the art horror anthology STORIES OF THE EYE. He/They. Find Joe online at horrorsong.blog and on Twitter @horrorsong.

Reviews

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

NOTE: The author sent me a pdf of this book.

Some of the earliest writings by the human race are lists – inventories, bills of lading, receipts. In more elevated usages, our earliest writings are equally practical. Descriptions of the attributes of deities, instructions on how to invoke them, spells, cures, curses, blessings.
INVAGINIES, a collection of short stories by Joe Koch, took me back to all these primal uses of the written word. Perhaps it is also an exorcism, but not of the kind filmmakers prefer, with their tidily churchy lines of division. In these stories, Koch sings the unclean (so-called) spirit into not out of us and reveals its name to be the same as our own.
Specifically we have here stories about people seeking transformation. An older woman (or is she?) looking for love and enchantment with her boy-paramour and the debauched catamites she slays. A cleaning lady's grown up child who returns to the home of the preacher their mother worked for, to find the source of the primal hurt. Lovers scissored together, twined as one. An accident survivor stuffed with beloved flies. An artist and their model decomposing amidst a pandemic. What it means to be surgically transformed for/into who you love. Our complicated movements away and back to parental bodies. Our glimpses, through and due to pain, of something we approximate with the titles of divine, beloved, abject, adversary.
So far I've given the impression of a passionate, visceral book. And that's what this is. But it's also intellectually engaged and broad in its interrogation of culture, from the crudest infra-pop culture tidbits to the enshrinement of rapine as Great Art in museums and legends that form the cornerstone of delusions of civilization. Koch is spilling incantations to blood and other fluids. But they are also making you think while you feel.
Incantations are the kind of words that try to literally make the world. Poetry is a state of co-creation with the world. Inventories make reality more real by grounding them in words. The stories in INVAGINIES are incantatory, poetic, and they feel strangely tender and nurturing to me for all the extremes on display. Koch imagines a radical universe of such total alienation and immiseration that we are forced to turn to each other in acts of equally radical restoration. And that makes this book less one of 2024’s doubtless many excellent horror entries, and more a new report, an inventory, on the old quest Judaic people call tikun olam – repairing the world.

230224

[Becky Spratford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review in the April 1, 2024 issue of Booklist and on the blog: https://raforall.blogspot.com/2024/03...

There are 18 stories here. The first 17 are reprints and the 18th is original to the collection. I verified this with the publisher because the early ARC said 17 stories. It will be corrected.

Three Words That Describe This Book: grotesquely beautiful, thought provoking, lyrical

Notes:


The stories feature all of the creepy things readers would expect from a Horror collection, from rats, to clowns, to body horror; however, in Koch’s hands, they are not only showcased in ways readers would never expect, but also, the tales will leave both readers and characters forever changed.


This is literary fiction told through a Weird lens where the grotesque odd and dark corners shine through or twist around the prose

Prose is complex and lyrical but also beautiful in a grotesque way. You get lost in the prose and how it takes over you grabs a hold of you and then lets you go feeling changed.

Character sketches, moments in time that are stitched together into stories that are further stitched together into a collection that has a feel like it is one book and yet its not

For readers who want to mix their literary fiction with visceral, poetic prose that captivates while and discomforts at the same time such as in Tinfoil Butterfly by Rachel Eve Moulton and The Seventh Mansion by Maryse Meijer.

[LX · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off really interesting but I think my ARC was corrupted a little as there were so many errors with missing letters, random letters in the wrong place that just took me out of the reading experience sadly.

But from what I had read I liked how the exploration of gender was done, really glad to be introduced to Joe Koch

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the past few years, as I’ve delved further into indie and experimental literature and been exposed to the dazzling array of queer writers thriving therein, I’ve discovered something of a bad habit in myself—a tendency to automatically read as-yet-unidentified narrators as the same gender as their authors. I’ve been caught with my comprehensive pants down more than once, mentally misgendering first-person protagonists for pages at a time before coming to realize that I was picturing characters wholly opposite from, or at best, far less complex than what their creators intended; reflexively oversimplifying the very matters they were patiently, painstakingly working to elucidate to my basic-ass binary mind. I’m not proud of it—this snapback straight guy paradigm I fall into—and once I realize my error I generally scold myself, tuck my tail between my legs, and start whatever story I’ve misread over from the top, at least attempting to correct my perspective accordingly.

This gets exponentially harder, however, when it comes to Joe Koch. Not because their voice is unclear, but because it so fiercely resists the tethers of uniform interpretation. No one is exactly what they appear here. In fact, no one is exactly any one thing at all. Rather, these are tales of violative transformation and irreparable transcendence; of cagefights and waxwings; of bodies and Gods. With this writhing, groaning, blood-lubed groupfuck of a collection, Koch has pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of both never doing the same thing twice, and doing everything they could possibly think of all at once. If sexuality is a spectrum, then Joe Koch is a prism. If gender is a construct, then Joe Koch is a destroyer of worlds. You don’t even know yet how much you don’t know.

I first encountered Koch’s work via this book’s titular story, which originally appeared in Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice’s indispensable David Cronenberg anthology Children of the New Flesh (11:11 Press), and its inclusion in that tribute compendium to the impresario of body horror makes even more sense upon rereading it here in its natural surroundings. Kaleidoscopically revolving around two captives in some futuristic prison-cum-human-processing-plant, it serves as both a natural portal into Koch’s singularly disorienting, splatterpunk-by-way-of-Baudelaire style, and a gracious warning bell to those who might not possess the stomach for such fistular poetry. Both the shortest and densest piece in the book, its six tight-packed pages read like a dirty bomb waiting to go off; to cave in ceilings, collapse floors, and break the wheel of our cyclically consumptive society; a bomb set to “fuck this building so hard it falls to the ground.”

For those who survive this initial blast, “Bride of the White Rat” offers a breather from Koch’s bunker buster linguistics, but may still leave you hyperventilating by its conclusion, as it conjures a grimly tragicomic grotesque of right-wing paranoia—an unhinged young man so gnarled by hate (and almost certainly self-hate as well) that he feels compelled to don ill-fitting womenswear to prove his inviolate masculinity, and fabricate a 1984-inspired rattrap facial contraption to further test his mettle against whatever liberal queer apocalypse he fears is heading his way. Told through the eyes of his parlous kindhearted girlfriend, and intercut with some hideous details regarding the rodents used in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, it flips the script on the MAGA trend of dehumanizing marginalized people groups as vermin, reclaiming and redeploying the metaphor for the insidious fascism-creep America’s been slow-playing at least since Trump first descended that golden escalator nearly a decade ago (if not since 9/11) (if not longer still). The most straightforward (and straight) narrative Invaginies has to offer, “Bride of the White Rat” functions almost as a second beginning—a depiction of the traditional male/female binary at its most toxic and corrupt. If “Invaginies” is the incendiary by which Koch sends us back to the stone age, then “Bride of the White Rat” is the stone age upon which they must build.

And build they do. For within the synesthetic hyper-collage of stories that follows, quite literally nothing is off limits. “I Married a Dead Man” traces the lonely, post-traumatic pursuits of a young queer hustler working the docks night after night in search of the shame-closeted father who abandoned them. “Leviathan’s Knot” puts you inside the agonized mind of a female heretic being burned by Christians at the stake, only to achieve ascendancy through recombinant unification with the male God she refused to renounce. “Eclipse, Embrace” evokes the spirit of Angela Carter, interweaving werewolf and Red Riding Hood folklore in a revisionist tale of queer love and survival. “All the Rapes in the Museum” recounts an ecstatic ménage à trois between a seraphic statue, a witch, and an Iron Maiden. And “Convulsive, or Not at All” skips across eons, from the hulking desert deity Amon to an omnisexual starship princess preparing to birth the void and return the world to chaos once more. In a way, this story contains the whole massive scope of Koch’s enterprise writ small. The past is but a mythology to dismantle; the future, a science fiction to realize and explore. And the present in-between? A liminal goulash of undiluted horror. The horror of all that must happen before we finally evolve ourselves whole.

Perhaps the scariest aspect of reading Invaginies is the way in which it begins, after a time, to unmoor you—from time and history, from plot structure and genre, and from your own senses and feelings about your body; a nauseous literary approximation of vicarious gender dysphoria. But through the comparatively wider lens of the queer experience, and their sorcerous smithery of bent and battered language, Koch at least effects a vision of a different kind of world—a better tomorrow we can see, even if we can’t yet comprehend it—as though painting fantastical landscapes directly upon our brains. And with the book’s longest, and final story “The Wing of Circumcision Hands” Koch arguably threads the last suture closed on their own human centipede of nested narratives. Set within a vast, underground cathedral—a sentient network of chambers pulsing with profane iconography and organic theatre screens (which may well be projecting every story you just read upon its throbbing walls)—it’s part museum heist, part Videodrome dungeon. And as its twinned protagonists—shackled at the wrist—are drawn deeper and deeper into this cavernous “angel trap”—bearing witness to a Grand Guignol finale to rival The Broken Movie, Guadagnino’s Suspiria, and every Mortal Kombat fatality ever executed—it becomes easy to imagine them as the very same pair of anonymous prisoners plotting terroristic escape however many years later in the book’s opening tale. It’s as if Koch is trying to remind us, one last time, that while these cycles of confusion and enlightenment, subjugation and resistance, violence and empathy, are ongoing and quite possibly infinite, that in no way devalues the work of breaking them. That “the more one searches for meaning or narrative, the less there is.” That we must always keep the big picture in mind, and remain willing to start over again.

[james ambrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

The father of petrifying confusion does it again! Each of the 17 stories in INVAGINIES is a pitch black rabbit hole lined with shattered stained glass and a sticky with a plethora of unidentifiable bodily fluids and you'd have to put me in a Saw trap to make me pick my favorite of them all. The titular "Invaginies" short prepares you, as much as you can be prepared for literature like this, for all the delicious weirdness to come. "The Wing of Circumcision Hands" is such a powerful and grotesque ending to the collection that made me yearn for a movie that doesn't even exist. Between those meaty bookends, "Convulsive, or Not At All" spans ages of divine confusion, "Chronoplasty" features an inhuman yet wholly humanly relatable glimpse at violence aimed at the heart of trans bodies, and "Coneland" is downright the best clown horror I've ever read. "Reverend Crow" is the only story here to fall flat in my opinion but it's still enjoyable -- a red giant among dazzling white dwarf stars.

It was an honor to receive an ARC of this collection from an author so personally inspiring. My mind has been thoroughly blended in a meat grinder and I can't recommend enough that you brave the same.

[Kyle E. Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone already familiar with Joe Koch's work probably already has Invaginies on pre-order--and they won't be disappointed by his latest collection of short works. I use "works" here rather than "stories" because I don't think Koch is primarily interested in telling stories, at least not easily recognizable ones. In fact, many of the techniques used throughout the collection actively resist narrative (and its metaphysical correlate, time). Narrative, when present, is buried underneath textual disorder and confusion, as dissociation and anxiety bury traumatic experiences, and requires the reader to unbury it, as one might or must work to uncover the parts of the unconscious we do not want to see or (re)experience. The melty, shifting worlds of the stories also undermine what we often take for granted as a stable reality: everything is always turning into something else. You can't be sure that your body is your body, that A=A. Koch is also working on a political or ideological level in the same vein, translating the trauma of the individual to the collective. In this way, Koch is a disrupter. His non-narrative tendencies and strategies take on an ideological ambition. They are protesting the neat, orderly stories of the status quo. They are queering the mainstream narrative, however you wish to define that. Thus, Koch's style is both naturally psychological and social/political--what you might accurately call horrorpunk--and these two currents feed (and feed on) one another.

Many others have written about the content of Koch's stories and worlds, as well as the breadth of some of his inspirations and concepts drawn into the stories, so I want to highlight a few techniques or stylistic patterns I've noticed in the writing instead. The first is Koch's commitment to the present tense. I dislike the present tense in fiction, unless it's used for a good reason, and here it is. Koch wields the present tense like a weapon. One of the reasons I don't like the present tense is that it's more difficult to read than the past tense, every sentence is more aggressive. It's also paradoxically more distant than the past. It gives the effect that everything is happening at the same time, and I think that's why it works here. Koch is consciously messing with time; the effect is one of violence. The second technique is a blurring of character/narrator. Except in the few more "traditional" stories, there's often a weird anonymity or fuzziness to either the narrator or the protagonists. It's like an experiment: to what does the reader cling without an I? The effect is frustrating, which is a compliment. Third, a general disorder and confusion on the level of the language itself, which is really a group of techniques, such as breaking normative syntax. Much of this is also done through poetry: many of the sentences don't necessarily "mean" anything in the standard sense, but suggest and write around the thing itself, often to destabilizing effect. Even when describing action, such as this selection from "Pigman, Pigman"--"Grappling men, or man-like things; hungry pig breath of mutual desire grown labyrinthine in soft boy exile"--the poetry makes the writing more unsettling than had it been prose.

If I have one potential critique, it's a lack of contrast, both within each piece and between them. Some of my favorite stories in the collection arguably have more contrast than others, such as the odd sweetness in "I Married a Dead Man," or the critical interludes of "Bride of the White Rat." (Although that doesn't fully encompass why I favor some and not others.) In the absence of contradiction, there exists the threat of monotony, which would, I think, undermine the overall effect. Koch works by overwhelming, like the antithesis of a cathedral; we are not in awe of the Holy and on our knees--we are in fear of the Profane and on our backs. Perhaps it's partially due to the form of the collection itself: within the context of a single story, this strategy by overwhelming works well and remains fresh, but in repetition loses some of its power. That being said, I doubt many will agree with me. Ultimately, I think it is a kind of ecstasy Koch seeks to evoke--an ecstasy of unbearable intensity: reality acting on a permanently open wound. Horror will be convulsive or not at all.

[Dan Scamell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Invaginies from Clash Books is a collection of short dark stories by Joe Koch that releases June 25 2024! I received this one as an advance copy in return for an honest review.
This one clocks in at around 230 pages, and contains 18 stories of varying lengths. Most seem to fall between 2,000 and 5,000 words.

This collection covers a wide variety of themes in either overt or subtle ways. I’m not going to go through story by story here since there are so many, but some of the things that came up while reading these were ideas on sex and gender identity and gender roles, capitalism and social politics, sexual repression and freedom and what comes along with both of those concepts. Like I said, there’s a lot to chew on with these stories. And most are presented in ways that can unnerve or squick you out depending on your tolerance for horror, and there’s certainly some horror here.

Some standouts for me here were Bride of the White Rat, which had some good horror and fun characterization, Chronoplasty, which had a fun setting, and Pigman, Pigman, which was short and blunt in a good way.

The main overall critique I have for this collection would be more of a critique on myself. I felt very stupid reading a lot of this book. The language and prose here are very stylistic, to the point of coming across like beat writing or slam poetry at times. I struggle with that, and there is a lot of it in this collection. The narratives were very loose in places, and if you’re a moron, like me, you might have trouble following along and picking up everything that Koch is putting down. Despite the themes and tones I got from this book, I know I missed plenty of stuff in here.

I had to read this one in small bites, which is probably the way to best do it. Unfortunately, I had to push through to get a review out, and I feel like my experience suffered for it. I’d recommend taking this one slowly, bit by bit. Otherwise, the flowery narrative style might get a little much.

There were a lot of stories written in second person in this one, which I found interesting. It’s not something you see done a whole lot, and it tended to work where it was utilized here. I’m not terribly well-versed in the world of weird fiction, but overall this gave me similar vibes to the Thomas Ligotti and Jon Padgett that I’ve read. It also reminded me of V0idheads by Chris Kelso, which I reviewed in the past.

So if you’re a fan of weird, surreal fiction with a sexual and sometimes unpleasant slant, I’d say give Invaginies by Joe Koch a read. Even if you struggle with atypical narration and prose like I sometimes do, I’d say you can still get plenty of enjoyment out of it if you take it piecemeal and at your own pace.

[James Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I’m going to brutalize your surface so humanly it never ceases to bleed.”

So the author promises in the opening eponymous story and 'Invaginies' certainly delivers. Those with a finger on the pulse of modern alternative horror will be no stranger to the visionary Joe Koch. Those with a taste for the truly inventive and weird could do a lot worse than making his new collection a viscous and visceral entry point. Or perhaps an orifice, for there are few dark holes that the author won’t delve into, presenting a no-holds-barred, Grand Guignol of the genre in these eighteen arresting stories.

While the author adopts a sharp literary approach, employing a stunning degree of prose in each tale, the atmosphere and the various settings amount to a relentless fever dream, each journey poetic, alien and ineffably, achingly human. Consider the gruesome, hyper-BDSM yarn 'The Bride of the White Rat' wherein a toxic couple strap cages to their faces to allow the rodents in question to nibble at their faces for kicks. Or the god-eat-god, gory resurrection of 'Convulsive, Or Not At All' in which the Pleistocene Era deftly parallels a distant sci-fi future where a rocket lands and a cult member ‘pounds their well-functioning vagina’. 'Chironoplasty' takes the reader on a hallucinatory ride through a blend of the mythological and body horror, a tale that warns one of graphic content in situ and fiercely declares, “My body is not your battleground. You know nothing of my pain.”

Transformation and confrontation haunt 'Invaginies' to breathtaking effect, giving us a glimpse not only of the trans experience, but the otherness of the monstrous imagination writ large and its accompanying challenges. Soon absorbed in the author’s vivid, inescapable web, the pages turn like blood-soaked portraits in some lost, underground gallery, plunging deeper and darker at every turn. In 'All the Rapes in the Museum', an angel and a witch undergo systemic torture in an oppressive future ‘still ruled by soldiers and judges’. Closing tale, 'The Wing of Circumcision Hands' takes flight in a sequence of agonised couplings in an oozing, inverted city of black salt, the thread of pervasive doom sublimed and perfected. All these stories are standouts in a collection that never misses a beat in its mission to thrill, disgust and disturb. And to imbue a sense of a bleak surrealist fugue, one that beguiles and astonishes as much as it appalls.

The influences in 'Invaginies' encompass Lovecraft at his weirdest, Burroughs, Cronenberg, a touch of Ballard and Ligotti, along with a healthy dash of splatterpunk. Koch paints on his own canvas, however, and his chimerical voice roars throughout this collection, on the one (red-smeared) hand a wanton celebration of queerness and on the other a fresh and striking perspective that transcends the Horror genre.

Highly recommended.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is amended from its longer form which appeared on my blog
Review copy received from author for review consideration

As a long-time admirer of Joe Koch’s work, to hear that he had a short story collection coming out about a year or so ago made me thrilled. Entitled "Invaginies," Koch presents 17 stories for the reader.

Joe has deservedly high critical acclaim from other amazing voices in the horror genre like Laird Barron and Hailey Piper, who recognize Joe’s unparalleled excellence and sublime prose. Having said that, I would love for Joe’s work to reach higher echelons of reader awareness, of many more people recognizing the sublimeness of his stories.

You can say things in a book review like “disturbing” or “disorienting” or that a story cut you like a razor and so on, and the entire time, I was awestruck by how intense and incredible the stories in the collection were so I have made an effort to make the review more evoking in terms of trying to capture the depths of how reading Joe Koch’s works will make you feel.

“I Tied Your Heart on a String” gives Edgar Allan Poe a run for his money in terms of Gothic sublimeness, of an obsessive love. It’s absolutely about love, but more about how it can permeate through a person and mess with time. The sheer poetry of the words here is just an amazing thing to behold.

Similarly, “Beloved of Flies” seems like it could scare Beelzebub himself. It’s a tale of being devoured and of devouring, and it’s very memorable.

Joe Koch is the echelon of the Dark Star guiding the horror genre in a way that it has needed to slide down for a long time with stories that are so evocative, so moving, and made me as a reader want to jump into some of these worlds and become some of these characters because they feel my pain and, I suspect, the pain of others, in a way that we have not really been able to express before.

Buy this collection NOW. And when you go to buy it, make sure you take the time to savour each story and to let the stories absorb you as the reader.

[Haley · Rating 5 out of 5]

do you ever just read a book, sit with it for a couple weeks, and then still not be able to decide exactly what you learned or how you felt about it? and yet, still be absolutely obsessed with every single word and phrase? well, that’s how i’m feeling about INVAGINIES by Joe Koch! it’s the author’s latest collection of 18 stories (17 reprints and 1 new one!), full of tales about transformation, identity, horror, and so much more. it’s SO visceral in its storytelling, as Koch manages to tie together the mundane and the otherworldly with such effortless creativity— i feel like every word echoed loudly through my brain, and they’re tattooed within my ribcage for weeks following my first read! i’ve notated the “date finished” section with a question mark; with short stories, i never really feel like i’m finished, lol— i enjoy poring the pages with a fine-toothed comb and a pen to annotate and let each story sing to me!

these stories each have their own tone— agony, lust, obsession, dissociation, grotesque horror and so much more. in recent reviews, i’ve seen Koch described as a horrorpunk author, and i think it’s an apt term— their writing is radical, rebellious, and horrifying at the purest sense of the word. i’ve noted three of my top stories, but i’d probably consider “I Married a Dead Man” my ultimate favorite, as it’s so unique in its phrasing compared to some of the more ephemeral tales in the collection. Koch never holds back, wielding his narrative prowess like a sword at times, a mallet at others, and a still-beating heart throughout every single line.

thank you to Clash Books for the gifted ARC to read and review— and to my Clever Fox Book Journal for making it easier and easier to put my thoughts into words! the rating circle is my favorite part— while Koch’s style isn’t the most readable or “light,” it’s absolutely one of my favorites:)

full post: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8KBrBvOs6f/

[Helen Whistberry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a rare (possibly unique?) occasion in which I'm reviewing a book I didn't finish but I have some thoughts on all the same. I received an ARC from the author of this collection and was expecting weird horror, which is a genre I enjoy and read a lot. What I got definitely falls under that umbrella, but these are ambitious literary and surreal fever dreams that are extremely emotional and gut-wrenchingly visceral. The language is very elevated and reads at times like incantations from an ancient grimoire. Grotesque, grim, and I would say possibly daunting for the average or casual reader. The author consistently makes unusual vocabulary choices that may leave you scrambling for a dictionary, but the writing is also confident, accomplished, and even beautifully poetic.

There was some unforgettable (and disturbing) imagery in the stories I read, and I am particularly appreciative of the trans allegories and the agony and celebration of the joys and terrors of transformation in general and the fight for the freedom to be one's truest self. (The final sentences of one of the stories sum up the rage and frustration and pride that underlies much of the writing: "...my body is not your battleground. You know nothing of my pain.")

So, given all that, why didn't I finish this one? To be brutally honest, these stories require careful attention. They are not to be skimmed over or picked up casually for a light distraction, and I'm not really in the headspace to devote that much of my brain to following the complex thoughts being expressed and the exploration of suffering that hits close to home. However, I think there is definitely an audience for this genre of exalted literary horror. If you are looking to be confronted, provoked, and challenged by an author with a unique and astounding imagination, I think you'll want to give this one a try.

[Micah Castle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Invaginies is like plunging headfirst into a maelstrom of sexual decadence and terrifying beauty, quickly realizing you never want to leave the wet, meaty madness within.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS BELOW

Favorite lines from the book:

"Half centaur, half man, half something-or-other; too many halves to make a simple whole and all the confusion of a fabled told and retold." — "Chironoplasty", pg. 68

"There's no god in this world just like there's no narrator in this story." — "Five Visitations", pg. 143

"These same foreign pale men who claimed the bravery of godlike judgement and reveled together homogenized in godlike exercise of power proved too small of will to shoulder the due burden of my murder." — "All the Rapes in the Museum", pg. 162

"You cannot hide behind her shell with or without me, for the iron maiden is a modern lie, the invention of nineteenth-century carnival barkers and Inquisition fetishists, an imaginary relic of Victorian minds later embraced by heavy metal guitarists in a future still ruled by soldiers and judges." — "All the Rapes in the Museum", pg. 166

"We are dead beneath the bodies of our children ..." — "All the Rapes in the Museum", pg. 170

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely uncompromising in its prose, Joe's collection propels you forward through its weird, horrifying, beautiful stories. Some standouts for me were Bride of the White Rat, Oakmoss and Ambergris, and The Wing of Circumcision Hands, but everything here is incredibly well done. Joe is a writer who resists calls to explain the words on the page, they exist and readers must puzzle things out on their own, or better yet, just read and experience. Challenging, visceral, and deliberate, reading Joe Koch is an exercise in rethinking what horror and Weird and literature can be. If you open yourself up to the process, you will be deeply rewarded. And maybe a little grossed out.

[Ivy Grimes · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are lyrical stories, haunted songs about pain and the intricacy of bodies, along with love and understanding that seep through in rare moments. If you're already a fan of Joe Koch, you'll find the weird settings and sensual language and strange objects you love, yet this collection is also innovative in its range of settings and styles. New approaches to language here. I'm fascinated by the depth of emotion plumbed in these stories, in defiance of the bleak empires and merciless landscapes. 

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are some very weird and unique horror stories. Some I've read from other anthologies, but it was nice to revisit them. So far I don't see myself ever not liking anything Joe Koch writes. Everything I've read of theirs leaves me feeling grossed out, horrified or confused. They are so creative and I'm excited to read more of their stuff.

[Carina Stopenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

a really great collection of gruesome terrors from abject fiction royalty. visceral and introspective. however, the sheer density of each story made it reaaaally hard to get through—had to chunk it up to finish. while it wasn’t my favorite of koch’s work, i still thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Madison McSweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joe Koch’s stories feel like they take place in the cracks behind the physical world, depicting the phantasmagorical dramas that play out in our subconscious minds. Dream logic that might be more truthful than waking life. No one else writes fiction quite like this.

[Dex · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of art house vibe horror. I now get why I couldn't find any posts saying what this book or the stories were about. Hell if I know. I don't feel smart enough for this book. Beautiful lines tho.

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ambitious, visceral, and creepy as hell.

[Tiffany Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maximalist prose high in concept and stunning in execution, Joe Koch remains one of my auto-buy authors. Invaginies takes you deep into the brutality and beauty lurking in such skilled strangeness.