In the End, You Kill Us Both

by V. Ivan

"A beautifully gruesome detailing of two peculiar people."

It's nearly Halloween, the sky won't stop weeping, and from the guts of Olympia's Eden Valley Psychiatric Unit emerges nineteen-year-old Leo Welch, staggering blindly into the streets of an unfamiliar city where her only company is a peculiar roommate, her two eldest children, and a bizarre collection of ladybug figurines. Jobless, pill-reliant and emotionally wounded, a life spent with one eye glaring at the past and the other squinting fearfully at the future is all Leo knows—until she meets fellow ex-inpatient Elowen Reeves, a mysterious drifter who swiftly captures Leo's attention and emboldens her resentment towards the monster who destroyed her life in Ely.

When a sudden, horrific event shatters Leo's image of her unusual new friend and sends them both on a dizzying road trip across the American West, Leo must finally face a choice she's spent years ducking from—allow the pain to consume her once and for all, or dive headfirst into the underbelly of her Nevadan hometown to kill her demons before they can get another stab at killing her.

Genres: Horror

340 pages, Paperback

Published October 19, 2024

About the author

Victor Ivan is a fiction author and horror enthusiast from the Canadian Maritimes. An appreciator of creepy crawlies and nineties supernatural thrillers, Ivan has been quietly crafting stories for over a decade. In The End, You Kill Us Both is his debut novel.

Reviews

[Bec · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overwritten

I am sorry but there are just too many descriptions and I'm only on page two. There is creating an image in the reader's mind and then there is having to reread the sentence to figure out what the heck they wrote. Each sentence went off on a descriptive tangent. Maybe it would have been a good book. Maybe I will read it another time. But for now, this was annoying to read.

[King Reinhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was weird, and I mean that in the best possible way. We've all seen Trainspotting, yes? You know how everything in that movie feels off and strangely hungry? How it feels like something is waiting in the shadows, just waiting to devour you, be it addiction or ill fortune or a whole other monster entirely? That's how IN THE END, YOU KILL US BOTH feels. It's dreamy, but in a grimy, nightmarish kinda way. Think Thelma and Louise if they were in a horror movie. Think Aileen and Tyria. That's the vibe.

This is a gory, gross revenge tale with a slow-burning queer romance at its heart. What more could you ask for? Leo is a sharp, damaged thing, and Elowen, who's definitely my favorite character, is vicious in the best was imaginable. They have major guard dog energy, and I am very much here for it! "Sure, I'll kill the Devil for you, Leo. It's no big deal." I am losing my mind over them.

The story is trippy and surreal, with dreams and nightmares and flashbacks galore, and the writing is so lush and poetic that it's easy to get lost in its shadows. The descriptions we get when we first meet Elowen, the Wolf, are especially gorgeous.

Do you like morally gray characters and stunning prose and being haunted by people who aren't even dead? Read IN THE END, YOU KILL US BOTH. Read it now.

Favorite quote: "The poor, dead Lenore I'd left behind gave a great, shivering sigh from the hall and disappeared."

[erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

many, many years ago i came across vic's work online and it's safe to say that it made quite the impression on me. it was such a wonderful feeling to get to hold this in my hands and become completely absorbed into leo's world, not like a fly on the wall because even that doesn't cut it. like, i was right in there, up close and personal in the beautiful mess of it all. the writing is absolutely gorgeous, with stunningly vivid descriptions of each and every setting as well as some completely life altering pieces of dialogue that are definitely going to stay with me. leo and elowen's relationship is expertly carved out, and during their conversations i'd find myself almost breathless, hanging on each and every word. just how i like it.

as someone who's obsessed with lesbian romances, morally grey characters, abusive men getting what they deserve, the beauty in horror, and loving enough to consume—this was the perfect novel for me. there's so much more i want to say but i'm struggling to find any words that are worthy enough. this is definitely going to be something i revisit time and time again. to vic, you inspired me a great deal when i was much younger and continue to inspire me now. keep doing what you're doing, because, god, you're doing it really bloody well. emphasis on 'bloody'. so so much love for this book!!!!

[Juliana]

unfortunately i'm making the decision to dnf this book

i received an eARC of this and was super excited but i've been stuck at 56% for a little over a month now and i don't foresee myself returning to it. it's weird and creepy in good ways that i usually enjoy but i just can't force myself to slog through a book if i'm over halfway through and not feeling a draw towards it. maybe this is a case of wrong place wrong time, but i just don't feel even slightly fulfilled by the plot compared to the premise of the book at all by a little over the halfway point so i'm going to have to dnf at least for now :(

[jordy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I sat in Elowen’s shirt and thought about killing the Devil. My desire an open, sugar-rotted wound."

Gloriously bloody, sticky, syrupy and sour—IN THE END, YOU KILL US BOTH sinks its teeth into the smoldering lesbian romance and gutsy homecoming of revenge—at what cost? With gut wrenching prose, exquisite imagery, and disgustingly delicious detail, V. Ivan has written the messy queer horror novel of my dreams…. and nightmares.

This book was written for the people who love when gore is described as sensually and as beautiful as the webbing of spider’s silk, people who fall in love with fictional characters and the horrible things they do, people who feel homesick even though they’d rather die than go home, and people who gnaw on revenge like an old bone, praying that finally, one day, it’ll just snap between their teeth.

We begin splat in the guts of Olympia, following young, reckless, dry wit Leo daydreaming about killing the Devil that haunts her past as she struggles to adapt into her new enviroment after living in a psychiatric unit for the past year and a half. Immediately, she is sucked into a new world of all sorts of peculiar characters: hilarious, sassy yet motherly Georgia who blazes a fire under Leo's ass by throwing a party in celebration of her release. Enter a crowd of people Leo wants nothing to do with, including too many pompous, flirty man-boys who don't know a boundary from a smear of roadkill on the ground, though she is much more interested in the mysterious Wolf lurking around the corner, always watching, sharp canines hidden behind their scarred lips.

I’ve never fallen in love with two characters so fast. The romance that erupts between Leo and Elowen is the festering of blood and water, a simmering friendship that creeps into deeper waters of the unknown, entangled between the lines of love and horror, fear and intimacy, predator and prey. From smoke breaks with Mary Jane behind the bowling alley and the bloodied nightmares threatening her waking sanity, twisty roadtrips in the middle of nowhere and rich, older women buying them drinks at the bar, IN THE END, YOU KILL US BOTH takes you on a thrilling, vicious adventure that breaks your heart a dozen times and still leaves you standing in a puddle of your own…. well.

Ivan makes you feel recognized. Makes you feel seen, recognized, understood. To know what it feels like to love the beast that screams fear, the vegetarian that craves meat, the badger that swallows the snake. If you're anything like me, I spent half of my reading highlighting or underlining my favorites lines. Would there have been pearls around my neck, they would have been clutched to death, popped apart and skittering across the floor along with the several smashed pieces of my heart. The mortifying ordeal of being known, and beyond.

If you are looking for hair-raising tension, an incinerating slow burn, the beautifully groteqsue, anti-redemption arcs, girls getting revenge, queer identies and anger, embracing the monster within, mouthwatering or bloodcurdling descriptions of scenery, and details that submerge you into same world as these characters, then this is the book for you. You FREAK. Leo and Elowen have found a permanent home in the cobwebbed furrow of my heart, and I hope they do for you, too.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I envisioned their teeth framed around my gnawed-on wrist, against a mound of pink, pretty tissue, blistering with nodules and pockets of white fat - a sensation I'd supposedly never feel. Snaking jealousy sized my throat and warped my breath."

4.5

In the End, You Kill Us Both is surrealist horror at its very finest, at its very best - it's like experiencing the most luscious of nightmares, like a dream that's melting, like memories that are fading away. It's just so, so very weird, in the very best possible way. It's a novel that's all teeth and drool waiting to drag you down into the depths of Hell. In the End, You Kill Us Both is horrendous, foul, and, so damn beautiful - poetic, yet ugly too, destructive, yet healing. What a monstrous novel, an apocalyptic hellscape. Grim, gritty, grimy, coated in filth and rot and ruin, this is a heart-shattering, gut-wrenching tale, a drug fueled, hazy, brutally confusing masterpiece. Reading In the End, You Kill Us Both made me feel like I needed to take the longest shower of my life so I could scrub the skin off my bones.

Is there anything better than a gore soaked, blood splattered tale of terror, revenge, and ghoulishly toxic queers? It's both vicious and grotesque in just the right ways, akin to the strangest, most horrible of acid trips. Brutal. Intense. So utterly easy to get lost in, all too easy to be absorbed by. This is the single most defining story of haunting, all-consuming love that surpasses anything on this earth. You know that feeling, when you love someone so strongly that they haunt every part of your life? That's what this novel feels like. Disturbing and bloody, it's a slow motion car wreck, it's a smoldering, stinking pit, stained with gasoline and reeking of death. What a deeply disturbing reading experience this turned out to be.

"I still fought the urge to call over the banister to tell Georgia that I understood - that if her children were afraid of the howling demon I'd made of myself the week before, writhing and sweating through fractured dreams and migraines like interspersed lobotomies in a bed that had once belonged to someone else, then I couldn't blame them. If she was afraid, and if she'd had guilt about forgetting me because I'd been so strangely quiet without the withdrawals, well, she could let go of that too. I was always either howling in pain or hardly there at all."

If something you love in literature is reading about unhinged, disgusting, messy, toxic people and their earth-shattering love for each other, if you love when gore is described as beautifully as the most intoxicating poetry, if you love when horror is examined so sensually, it's like laying next to your lover in bed, then this is the book for you. There's a deep, dark, extremely dank sadness that hangs over this novel. Something about the way that this author writes, it's just... It's captivating, it felt like it expunged my soul. In the End, You Kill Us Both made me feel so seen I craved obliteration. It's a mortifying experience, it's skin crawlingly horrific, it's foul and festering, and a marvelous example of queer horror done right.

"I swear I could always feel it - my repentance, just waiting below the surface, biding time. I used to have really nasty dreams over it, but once I hit the Echo, y'know - they stopped for the most part. Got replaced by other things. I was convinced that the Devil would come for me in my sleep and drag me through the floor into a fiery pit, where I'd burn and burn forever."

[V. Ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

hi! i wrote this book!

at face level, it's a story about two young queers who forge a deep connection amid the aftershocks of their pasts, and push themselves to make room for healing by taking incredibly drastic steps to snip off their traumas at the roots. this, of course, is not as simple as it sounds.

but really, this is a novel about lost love, and about continuing to find love within yourself and for others, despite all that love has already cost you. i wrote this book because everything has a cost, even if you have no choice but to pay it. it's a story about pain of all types, the unending staircase of healing, and what we do with all that is left. it's a teenage girl setting her bedroom on fire to silence the anger. it's trauma like a throbbing, hungry thing, draped in a permanent film across your eyes.

it's a very dear part of my heart, one that has been quiet for so long. thank you for reading 🖤

[hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given the privilege to read this book about a year ago, and Victor Ivan’s attention to detail still sits heavily in my mind.

This wasn’t my typical genre but Ivan was
able to grasp my interest with his attention to detail and immersive characters, by the end of it I was in tears due to the overwhelming feelings this book brought me. The characters come so far with their struggles, and Ivan’s analogies are so gratifying to read. These characters — Elowen and Leo are going to be forever stocked into my soul.

The writing is phenomenal, Ivan has a gift and I cannot wait to read more of his work!

[Shelby R · Rating 2 out of 5]

I barely made it through this book. It's so overly verbose, most of the story is a convoluted mess. Took way too long to get to any sort of a good story. That being said the last third or so wasn't horrible. I wish more of the book had been geared toward El and Lee's crazy relationship and habits like the end.

[BrizeeReads · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.8 It reminded me a lot of the Netflix show It’s the End Of The Fucking World-but with cannibals. Gave off a tragic Romeo and Juliet vibe made it feel like it was more YA than intended. Not bad just felt like a lot of dialogue for very little action.

[Raquel Curnow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh to make what is truly horrific so beautiful, warm and to feel like home.
This book is probably one of the most horrific stories I have ever read, written like poetry and music, singing to me about blood and gore and making me love it.
Stunning, heartbreaking and very deeply moving.

[Kristall Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was weird and gross and I absolutely loved it! Best new book I've read in a while! It's bloody and dirty, and we love to see nasty queers, that's always a plus!

[Puck Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is gritty, heartbreaking, and at times, cathartic. I could not reccomend it more, and I'm so glad I picked it up.

[Stacy Knickerbocker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Overly descriptive, gave up after 15 minutes of attempting to read this.