More Bugs

by Em Reed

Dumped, broke and stranded at her mother's house, Amy has few options for escape. Hanging out with her ex comes with getting to know his new girlfriend, someone who looks suspiciously like Amy's younger, straighter doppelgänger. Strapped for cash and desperate to be out of her mother's home, she ends up babysitting the UFO-obsessed kids of the hot working mom down the street. Over a dull, torrid summer in the Pennsylvania suburbs, strange lights linger on the horizon, and subterranean connections reach out their tendrils in the dark, signalling another, otherworldly possibility.

Genres: Horror, Fiction

ebook

Published February 14, 2025

Reviews

[Eve Harms]

An insightful and thought-provoking portrait of suburban alienation and longing with a delightful dash of body horror. Through engrossing prose, Reed stealthily weaves the impossible and everyday to reveal the suffocating dread of our personal histories.

[Beck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subversive in ways beyond what I imagined. A book that gets under the skin and scrapes at the psyche, finding sore spots you didn’t know you had.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appropriately unsentimental but kind-hearted and romantic story about the walls between us and other people, how it's impossible to really know another person but it's beautiful to try anyway. Cried gently through the whole last quarter of the book on a plane ride next to a coworker, a semi-mortifying experience Amy could've had an excellent page-and-a-half internal monologue about. I really really liked this, makes me want to check out more of Em's short stories and also other novels by the publisher.

[Ai Jiang]

A big thank you to the publisher for an ARC of the book for a blurb!

MORE BUGS is equal parts quirky and unsettling—an uncanny and almost absurdist story in the way it disrupts the mundane with the defamiliarizing and strange over the course of a slow burn narrative. The characters are compelling and flawed as they navigate the uncomfortable and disorientating, while exploring identity, sexuality, and shared vulnerability all while everything threatens to collapse under the characters' own tendencies towards self destruction. Through complex and mess relationships, Reed shows how love can be developed as a form of reliance and survival. Meditative, philosophical, but also gloriously weird yet painfully familiar.

[Lyndsey Croal]

Thank you to the Publisher for an ARC of this book! My blurb is below:

With relatable characters and subtle speculative and horror elements, More Bugs intricately explores the isolating feeling of returning home as a stranger. As the seemingly suburban tale unravels, the book takes a satisfying turn into the surreal, delving into the dark desires that come from being tempted by the uncanny and unknown.

[I. Merey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book-length compulsion to pull off the scab and look underneath. What an expectationfuck of a novel and I say that in the most affectionate sense!! I truly loved how this book took you down a familiar route (disillusioned college girl comes back home to the ‘burbs to Figure It All Out) and then just turned all of that right on its head—and then turned it back again. This is a relentless probe into the rhythm of metamorphosis and coming-out (AKA revealing to your surroundings and community that they have assumed a default about you that is not true). A delicate examination of the constant dance of calibration and recalibration we are performing with ourselves and those around us, to maintain some tentative equilibrium. MORE BUGS posits the question: need someone be inherently harmful just because they are not at all who or what you assumed them to be?

Combining the charming, brainy neuroticism of an 00s-era Zach Braff with tits (I think Amy wouldn’t get mad at me for that description!); things that go bump in suburbia; extraterrestrial!!!!; aching post–coming-of-age bisexuality; and some truly beautiful, winding prose; Reed contrasts themes of dreary familiarity with the delicious urge to scratch off the wound and expose all the writhing unknowables. Sometimes, comfort and understanding really do come from where you would least expect it… Like great books do, MORE BUGS leaves its hero Amy, and us, with more questions than answers.

[Lion · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe love can be different

[L.N. Holmes]

This is a Small Spec Book Awards nominee!