I Will Rot Without You

by Danger Slater

"I Will Rot Without You is like Cronenberg's The Fly, if it had been directed by Frank Zappa and Bruce Bickford. Nightmarishly rich in vision, absurdly and painfully hilarious, sorrowfully poignant, and bristling with outrageous surprises that never ever ever stop coming till it's done." (John Skipp, horror and fantasy author, from his introduction)

When the world falls apart and your body starts to rot, let the roaches lead.

Meet Ernie. His life is a mess. Gretchen's gone, and the apartment they once shared in this grey, grim city is now overrun with intelligent mold and sinister bugs. Then, his neighbor Dee shows up, so smart and lovely.

If he can just get past the fact that her jealous boyfriend could reach out of her blouse and punch him in the face at any moment, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. Unfortunately for all involved, a great storm is coming, and it will wash away everything we've ever known about the human heart.

Genres: Horror, Bizarro Fiction, Fiction, Novella, Humor, Adult Fiction

Audible Audio

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Wonderland Award winning author Danger Slater is the world’s most flammable writer! He likes to use a lot of exclamation points!

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

look, sometimes love is gross.

not that "white people making puppy eyes at each other" gross like in gum commercials or whatever



or even those inappropriate pdas on the late-night subway where maybe you don't want to see so much of a stranger's pubic hair exposed under fluorescent lighting.



but more the kind of gross where the obsession with your love-object causes you to chop off your fingers and sew them into her skin, just so you will always be together and able to keep tabs on her. or the aftermath of a disastrous love affair, whose residual emotional toxicity takes the shape of millions of cockroaches or pestilent mold. or the love that does not end even after the death of one of its participants, in the most literal version of that scenario.

you know, that kind of gross love.

and there's so much gross on display here. buckets of gross. cupboards full of squirming grossness. gross getting so topheavy with gross that it drops off of the gross to which it is attached and falls onto the floor, spreading the gross into all-new corners.

all for love, baby…

don't let my three stars fool you, because i did really like this book. or more, i appreciated it. it's a necessary and raw look at all the dark intensity of new love old love broken love wrong love and i can definitely pinpoint times in my romantic past where i would have read this book and been like GET OVER HERE AND LET ME SPANK YOU LIKE A CHOIRBOY, DANGER SLATER FOR HOW RIGHT YOU ARE!

but now i'm all old and cool and mellow and i can read this with a nostalgic smile and a wince, but it doesn't hit me the way it once may have, in my heady youth.

however, as a literary achievement apart from my personal experience of reading it, it's very impressive. it takes all the beautiful and the ugly parts of romantic relationships and combines and distributes them into so many different configurations and proportions that it's like this tiny encyclopedia of hurt and desperate love and ruin and optimism and nightmarish howling and it ends up just this side of beautiful, on the beautiful-horrifying coin-toss.

it's bizarro, but it's bizarro with a vision. it's splatter, but the good kind of splatter, where you get to see a pretty pretty butterfly in the bloody rorschach test



and as great as this inscription to ME is



the dedication'll make anyone swoon.



nicely done, danger slater, you gross old softie.

******************************************
best week ever - in which i receive three books in the mail i really really want to read and maggie really really wants to sleep on.

best week ever part two:



which comes with its own free bugs



and cards!



best week ever part one
best week ever part three

come to my blog!

[Danger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't objectively review my own book, even though I feel it's important that you all understand that I am a LITERARY GENIUS OF THE HIGHEST CALIBER. So here are a few choice blurbs from people and publications that have read (and loved) I Will Rot Without You:

"A true masterpiece in Bizarro storytelling." - BENEATH THE UNDERGROUND

"Like Casablanca if it were directed by Harmony Korine's cousin on a mescaline binge." - DIRGE MAGAZINE

"It's so much more than in-your-face splatterpunk, it truly defies description" - CEMETERY DANCE

"A complete upside-down, inside-out trip through the wringer, fascinating, impossible to walk away from or forget." - HORROR FICTION REVIEW

"At its core, I Will Rot Without You is an authentically human book about loss, identity, and the cost of moving on. It is also wonderfully gross." - SPLATTERPUNK ZINE

"I Will Rot Without You goes 200 miles per hour, in punchy bursts through Ernie's chaos, which is hilarious in places, devastating in others, and populated by a cast of insanely imaginative characters doing unimaginable things." - THESE WALKING BLUES

"If Richard Brautigan and William S. Burroughs had a baby, it would be Danger Slater." - THE NOVEL PURSUIT

"[I Will Rot Without You] is the kind of book that makes you want to write one of your own." - JOSH MALERMAN, author of Bird Box

[Olethros · Rating 4 out of 5]

-De nuevo, otra forma de escribir una historia sobre el amor y no exactamente de amor.-

Género. Novela (con premisas fantásticas, eso sí).

Lo que nos cuenta. El libro Me pudriré sin ti (publicación original: I will Rot Without You, 2016) nos presenta a Ernie Cotard, un hombre cuyo apartamento está lleno de cucarachas y moho, con un casero que no parece reaccionar a esa hecho y sí al supuesto deseo sexual de Ernie hacia su obesa esposa, con una exnovia llamada Gretchen que lo abandonó, con una atractiva vecina llamada Dee que tiene partes de su celoso novio Cutter unidas al cuerpo y con un vecino que sufre una infestación similar mientras vive con la momia de su esposa muerta en la cocina. Una serie de eventos “cotidianos”, que incluyen el deterioro de su cuerpo, harán que la “normalidad” de la vida de Ernie se haga un poco menos “normal”.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Seb · Rating 5 out of 5]

2025 reread: I probably enjoyed this book even more than the first time I read it. Its depths are immeasurable and you get a lot to think and meditate about.
The three couples and four different kinds of Love are essential to the story and intertwined until some are blurred.

I Will Rot Without You is a favorite of mine and I'll read it again and again with growing pleasure!

===============================


I Will Rot Without You was my first encounter with Bizarro. At the time, I stopped reading it early, I was quickly disgusted by what I read and it felt like too much to take.

I've made my way through Bizarro by now, and I've read all Danger Slater's I can find except this one until now! And I can say that I was dumb to let go this novel previously because it's way over my most unconsidered expectations.

Basically, this is the story of Love. But not the nice and rosy parts nor the abusive kind that make you sick in the stomach. There are four love stories here, some intertwined. Three of those are meeting their end or have already ended. Through those couples, we encounter many facets of the breakup, the loss, the coping with the sadness, the rebuilding of oneself but also the anger toward the ex-partner, the wrongly placed possessivity of the other or the control over one's life. Until the biggest confrontation of all.

With this book, we get a beautiful metaphore, a gory retelling of the ugly and sad parts of Love, but you mainly get an Ode to Love as it is ultimately the central subject and not Ernie.

I Will Rot Without You has won a Wonderland Book Award and that's no wonder! It is a true masterpiece and I highly recommend it to anyone!

[Janie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do we rot without each other?  Does love lost cause us to lose our body parts and surrender to the fungus that is the ennui of ordinary life?  Well, this is what happens to Ernie Cotard.  After breaking up with his girlfriend, Ernie is plagued with unusual problems.  His apartment is overrun by cockroaches.  His bathroom sink births the mother of all fungi.  His fingers turn green and foul-smelling while his face erodes.  Ernie is not the only one with problems.  His neighbor Deedeedeedeedeedeedeedeedeedee has pieces of her jealous boyfriend attached to her body.  Mr. Humboldt, the elderly man down the hall, keeps the corpse of his long-dead wife sitting at the dinner table.  Is there is a surplus of zany metaphors on the loose here?  I will answer that with a firm "no."   The imagination, wit and solid poetry contained within these pages are endlessly entertaining.  The author skillfully illustrates love's after-effects and how they make us feel as if the world is deteriorating around us.  And on us ... maybe keep an eye on your skullcap, unless it has already fallen out.  But, as my favorite character and born-again cockroach points out:  WE SURVIVE!  If the cockroaches can rise again, so can the lovelorn.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Review: I Will Rot Without You

Read: 2/17/16 - 2/20/16
Stars: 4 - Strongly Recommended to lovers of the strange and gory
Pages: 143
Publisher: Fungasm Press
Released: February 2016





If you threw Joe's Apartment and the cockroach scene from Creep Show into a martini shaker with the books The Ruins and Hearers of the Constant Hum, and spiked it with a-broken-heart-love-story-of-your-choice, what you poured out might look something like this.

Fucked up in all the right ways, Danger Slater's I Will Rot Without You is the perfect companion book for the love-sick and left-behind. With Gretchen gone, our main man Ethan has slipped into a mental funk and has begun to let things go. The bills are piling up, his apartment is being overtaken by cockroaches, and strange, fuzzy mold is sprouting out of his bathroom sink. You know how it goes. When the heart aches something fierce, everything else can go to hell, including your personal hygiene, and you can say goodbye to a good night's sleep because that little bitch is no where to be found.


"For me, sleep doesn't come easy. Not anymore. And when it finally does come, it merely passes through me as transiently as the breeze that passes through the tops of the trees. There's nothing to hold on to. Just air. For me, sleep is just a series of extended blinks...It's the place where memories refuse to die. Memories like cockroaches themselves. It's the place where I can still see her."

Tell me you haven't been there? Tell me that doesn't sum it up perfectly? Haunted by the history and memories you've made, tossing and turning and cry-vomiting yourself to sleep, knowing the moment you nod off, your unconscious mind will take over and bring her back to you, like old home movies being played against the back of your eyelids. You've been there. You know how hard it is to move on.

And Ethan's not the only one who's struggling to let go. There's his drop-dead gorgeous, down-the-hall neighbor Dee, whose jealous boyfriend has been severing off parts of his body and sewing them on to hers, and his other neighbor Humboldt, who has strung his dead mummified wife up like a puppet in their kitchen.

Things really start taking a turn for the bizarre, though, when Ethan awakens from one of his dreams to a cockroach feeding him some of the bathroom mold. As the ingested fungus starts to take hold and he slowly begins to rot from the inside out, Ethan goes from licking his love wounds to a man on a cockroach-ass-kicking mission, but the roaches have other things in mind for him. And so does the world, apparently. Because as Ethan and Dee prepare to battle the bugs, a storm of apocalyptic proportions is starting to gather outside...

Strangely beautiful in its repulsiveness, I Will Rot Without You continuously surprises you with its grotesque descriptions, which are softened only by the gentle prose in which Danger has wrapped them. The violence of the novel is astonishing, the gore is glorious, and though it physically hurts to read it, it's impossible to stop.

The gore...

"Buckets of intestine spray across the kitchen with geyserlike profusion. Guts and blood and chunks of torn flesh splatter against the cabinets like paint from the tip of an abstract artist's brush...from the cistern of Humboldt's ruptured abdomen the bugs Deirdre vomited into his mouth now reemerge. They spill over the edge of his wound like basalt from the earth and crawl out in all directions."

followed by the glorious...

"I press my face against hers and we kiss. We kiss like our kissing were the only raft we had left to hang on to. And my face starts to melt. And so does hers. Our faces melt into each other. And our bodies melt into each other too. Skin like sheets of paint stretching from her body onto mine, blended together..."

again, and again, and again.

[Frank Errington · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Will Rot Without You is not a book I would have sought out on my own. I've never read anything by the author, other than some of the reviews he's written on Goodreads. I've never read anything from the small press responsible for its publication, although I have read a number of short stories from John Skipp, the owner of Fungam Press.

I Will Rot Without You was sent to Cemetery Dance for review and when I saw it on the list of books offered this month, I recognized the name from Goodreads and thought this might be interesting. I love it when I'm right.

Before I get into the heart of the review, let be hit on what kept me from being over-the-top in love with this book. Because it is written entirely in the first person, there were numerous times where I wondered whether I was reading what amounted to grammatical errors on the part of the writer or if the errors were due to the character's lack of education. Lines like "and then the dreams ends" and "it feels like signal" drove me to distraction. There were too many to ignore.

Aside from the minor irritation mentioned above, I really enjoyed Danger Slater's writing style. It's gonzo or bizarro writing with a bit of beautiful prose mixed in. At times surreal and totally off-the-wall, yet the underlying story is charming. Its so much more than in-your-face splatterpunk, it truly defies description.

Ernie Cotard is having one helluva bad day. Before I get to the bottom of page one, my skin is crawling. God, I hate cockroaches, and mold, I hate mold, too. Both figure heavily in the telling of this story. Filled with a cast of colorful characters, including a neighbor of the Ernie's who has his long-dead wife still sitting at the kitchen table.

"The body of this woman sits at the kitchen table. Her hair is ash gray, long and frazzled. Yellow fingernails curl from the ends of her hands and her teeth are protruding out of her face as the slow decomposition she had obviously experienced softened and squashed her deformed skull. Mummified, exsiccated skin--equal parts purple and brown--pruned and completely depleted of all moisture. She is full of holes which the roaches climb in and out of, almost as if she were just another wall for them to burrow."

I Will Rot Without You is at times humorous, at times touching, but mostly utterly disgusting. And bloody, let's not leave out bloody. There are literally buckets of blood. If you are in the mood for something different, something which will likely leave you shaking your head. This is that book.

Not scheduled for publication until February 8, 2016, from Fungasm Press, I Will Rot Without You is one to add to your watch list.

Recommended for the truly adventurous reader.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

For our friend Cotard everything falls apart. Everything falls apart. Everything... Having been through a nasty breakup recently, the memories of his ex and their time together continue to haunt him. After she moves out, he discovers that the apartment they used to share is infested with roaches, who happen to have some big, mysterious plans for our protagonist.

So what are the strong points of “I Will Rot Without You?” I don’t know where to begin. This book is so full of clever analogies, intelligently crude humor, tragedy, and poetic prose, yet all is balanced so perfectly. It is also crazy how well all of it works to build the central theme. One of many passages that stood out to me: “The architecture seemed to pull my body forward toward a vanishing point at the far end of the hall, as if the construction of this room were but a single note played over and over, like a snake charmer’s chattel call, like a compulsively sterile convenience store soundtrack.” The surreal, dreamlike scenes and colorful descriptions never let up as the reader is pulled into Slater’s most accomplished and cohesive yarn yet. The line of roaches passing the bright red mold spores up and into Cotard’s mouth as he slept, and the accompanying dream scenes are good examples.

As far as characters go, they are extremely odd, yet memorable. ​The reanimated cockroach named Cross was a favorite, keeping me guessing as I pieced together all of what was happening. Hold on, did I mention the body parts? Lots and lots of body parts​: Cotard’s neighbor Dee Dee has parts of her jealous lover Cutter sewn to her, ready to keep any and all threats of another man away. The old man in the building who lives with the puppet corpse of his wife seated at the dinner table and says things like “You don’t give someone you love to the dirt.” The protag literally falling apart. Again, all tied into the metaphor of losing the love you truly cherished. We really do continue to carry a piece of that person and our experiences, long after our life has gone other places. Without spoiling anything, I will finish by saying that the ending was a great way to wrap all of this up.

I have anticipated this book for a while now and it was worth the wait. I really have nothing negative to say. I see this one appealing to fans of so many genres, as it ignores many of the typical classifications. Read this!

[Marvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever I read a Bizarro novel, I wonder if I will live through it. I have risked my life in literary jungles before. I grew up on Luis Bunuel movies and equally surreal books and films. I cut my teeth on William S Burroughs and the beats. I navigated through the wide open ranges of Transgressive Literature and I’m still not sure what that is. I journeyed through the scattered corpses of Splatterpunk. But Bizarro sometimes scares me.

The best way to describe Bizarro is as a tricked out version of everything I mentioned above. It is surrealism revved up by influences from Manga, Marvel anti-heroes, and B Horror Movies. With a few exceptions it is a young man’s (or woman’s) game. One for someone young and foolish enough to break the rules and go where the id takes you.

I Will Rot Without You by Danger Slater is an especially tricky piece of novelistic mayhem because it has a weird sweetness to it. That is a strange thing to say about a book that centers around mold and cockroaches, but it is there. If Richard Brautigan and William S. Burroughs had a baby it would be Danger. Anyone remember Joe’s Apartment, that terrible MTV produced movie about an apartment infested with cockroaches? Think of a version that is ten times better with a script by Kafka and envisioned by David Cronenberg and you are close to the experience of this bug and fungus infested novel but not quite.

What makes I Will Rot Without You work is that the author places the narrator in a empathetic and even everyman’s persona while subjecting him through a nightmare of body horror and downright disgusting violence and gore. Ernie is struggling through the breakup with his girlfriend Gretchen. Immediately after her departure, cockroaches have taken over his place and repulsive but seemingly sentient mold is rapidly growing to alarming proportions. The cockroaches are led by one of their own named Cross who is as involving and interesting as you will find any literary character who is a cockroach. Ernie finds them feeding him the pinkish mold while he sleep and starts to experience strange and terrible transformations to his body. In the meantime he is attracted to Dee, the girl next door, but when he approaches her, he is attacked by her boyfriend whose arms and other appendages are attached to her body. Then the weird stuff starts.

There are other outlandish things going on such as the old man who made his dead wife into a marionette. The author makes these characters fit in his unique world. The most realistic in-the-world character for me is Mr. Shakribarti, the verbally abusive landlord, but only because I once had a landlord just like him right down to the obscenities. . All this bizarreness and the casual way each character accepts it, at least at first, is par for the Bizarro course. Yet Slater cleverly weaves in a theme to the madness. It doesn’t take long to realize he is talking about relationships and its constructive and destructive abilities. The author’s elegant prose stands out, takes us through the odd occurrences, and gives it a beauty and meaning all its own.

In the end, Slater shows us what good Bizarro is all about. The best Bizarro is not just weird but weird with a purpose. His wonderfully descriptive and poetic prose is worth the admittance alone but I Will Rot Without You is so good on many levels that I recommend this to anyone, even those that hate cockroaches and mold. If you have never read a Bizarro novel, this would be a good one to start with. If you have, it is still a must read.

[Jessica McHugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been my favorite book of 2016 so far, and I wouldn't be surprised if it remains so for the rest of the year. The writing is sharp, witty, and gloriously grotesque. The prose reads like gruesome music, smooth as honey and blood that satiates and drowns in one. There's no doubt I'll be picking up more titles from Danger Slater and Fungasm Press. If you're a bizarro fan, you will definitely enjoy this book, and if you're not familiar with bizarro, this would be a great introduction to a lifelong love affair with the genre.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

You would think reading the best book of the year would be a jubilant experience. Ive just finished reading Danger Slater's I WILL ROT WITHOUT YOU, the best book of 2016 and Im crestfallen. It's January 4th. Think about it; no book I will read the remainder of this year will hold a candle to it.

I can take solace in the fact that I've just read the Wonderland Book of the Year for 2016. That's good news. For me. Bad news for every other bizarro novel that hasn't even been published yet. Your book will not win. Not in 2016. It's like being the AAA shortstop for The Yankees at the peak of Derek Jeter's career. You don't have a prayer in hell.

So what everyone needs to do is read I WILL ROT WITHOUT YOU. Highlight all the great lines. Buy more highlighters because you WILL run out of eye searing yellow ink several times over. Then we're all going to study the book, line for line and write thesis papers on the greatest literary work yet known to man and change the world. Together. And Danger Slater will be our president.

[Alex (The Bookubus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unique look at relationships combining bizarro, splatter and emotion. One minute there’s some crazy thing happening involving mould or cockroaches or the magazine Slutty Couches and the next there’s a very real and heartfelt exploration of love and the various forms relationships can take. A strange combination but one that absolutely worked for me and I look forward to reading more by Danger Slater.

[Sraah · Rating 5 out of 5]

this made me think of eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
but
more
um
whatever this was

that being said, i loved it and the message it’s portraying
it’s also hilarious and made me laugh so much

[Pedro Proença · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book by Danger Slater. An amazing analogy for the end of a relationship, written in a beautiful language. This is a Bizarro book with a heart. It's definitely Bizarro, the elements are all there, and on top of that, it's so moving and so good, it's amazing.

Fungasm Press is one of my favorite Bizarro publishers (an imprint of Eraserhead Press), and they don't disappoint with this one. This whole class, which includes Laura Lee Bahr's LONG FORM RELIGIOUS PORN, Autumn Christian's ECSTATIC INFERNO and Devora Gray's HUMAN FURNITURE, is just amazing. John Skipp did a fantastic job curating these books, and you should throw your money at them to keep'em coming.

All Danger Slater does is to grow as an artist from each work to the next. This is a writer to keep track of, for sure.

[Matthew Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wild ride! I read this book in one day and loved every moment of it. It’s strange, gruesome and packed full of clever metaphors. I was unsure if it were possible to match the level of entertainment as Puppet Skin, but came away pleasantly surprised.

[Lucas Sierra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elogio a las cucarachas santas del apocalipsis (Enumeración, 2020)

1. En un mundo que se destruye, sólo los eternamente aplastados encontrarán el coraje de soñar nuevas fes, de crear otras maneras de lo sagrado que puedan remontar la hedentina del final.

2. Entre las llamas que consumen todo y no dejan sino un resto de cenizas, los aplastados del mundo erigirán su iglesia. Por las ventanas cóncavas brotarán sus cantos, aleluyas cósmicas reclamando la eternidad de quienes jamás tuvieron tiempo.

3. Danger Slater quisiera escribir evangelios. Algunas noches, en las calles solitarias que recorre buscando historias, cree escuchar la voz de dios. Sólo después del entusiasmo inicial descubre que es en realidad el sonido de una radio, sintonizada en AM, que balbucea en el oído de un vagabundo dormido entre las basuras, rodeado de cucarachas.

4. Este libro es una historia de amor, un cuento de desamor. Todo amor es una relación tóxica. No está mal: en lo tóxico construimos la resistencia al apocalipsis, sólo los intoxicados tendrán otra oportunidad sobre la tierra.

5. Lo sorprendente no es una mujer con el cuerpo de su novio cosido al cuerpo, ni que la boca, que se cosió en el coño, le arranque el pene a un nuevo interés amoroso que lentamente se convierte en moho. Lo sorprendente es la inmortalidad de las cucarachas, la VERDADERA inmortalidad.

6. En el culto a lo aplastado la cucaracha es un animal mítico. Panteones de santas y de mártires se extienden por las paredes de una capilla infinita. El culto a las cucarachas es eterno, sin límites.

7. En algún rincón de una habitación el cadáver de Gregorio Samsa se congratula de la belleza de su hermana. Todo lo sublimemente bello es complemento de lo sublimemente horrible. Los horrendos se consuelan en esa certeza.

8. Cuando dios envíe el diluvio las parejas buscarán, sin encontrarla, un arca capaz de salvarlos. La única nave es un hongo que devora a sus tripulantes: elegimos el vientre donde hemos de podrirnos.

9. Al final, el óvulo fecundado, el mito del nacimiento, es la única certeza que necesitamos. Creer que nuestras células serán parte de un organismo más complejo, más grande, mejor.

10. Tatuamos una cruz blanca en nuestra espalda. Nos arrastramos en el misterio y confiamos en que, cuando nos aplasten, seguiremos intactos.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodness, what a beautiful and unexpected piece of apocalypse this was. I WILL ROT WITHOUT YOU is a novel, but it is broken down in a series of portraits featuring the lonely and miserable life of Ernie Cotard, who's gloriously failing to survive life without his ex-girlfriend Gretchen, who left him for obscure reasons.

I WILL ROT WITHOUT YOU could be called literary, it could be called surrealism, I just thought it was a beautiful allegory for a life falling apart without love. It cleverly used surrealism to avoid the pitfalls of male heartbreak novel where the protagonist wallows in his self-pity and to create a unique and haunting visual landscape. Consider me enraptured bu the writing of the man literature calls Danger Slater.

[Miguel Lupián · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aunque me destrozó, amé con todo mi corazón negro esta novelita que todo autor (weird, por supuesto) desearía haber escrito después de una ruptura. Es como si mezclaras el azote del Sea Change de Beck, el humor negro de John Dies at the End de David Wong, las descripciones grotescas de El atlas de ceniza de Blake Butler, los placeres de la nueva carne de Clive Barker y la imaginería siniestra de John Carpenter.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Does this book have someone whose boyfriend sewed his foot to her head?"

You're thinking, "Is this book a disturbing, beautiful allegory for breaking up with someone?"

You're thinking, "Does this book taste like roast beef?"

Yes, yes, and no. No it doesn't taste like roast beef. It tastes like paper, because that's what it's made out of.

Don't eat this book. Read it, and let Danger Slater take you on a wild journey that's hysterical and bizarre and stirring.

[Steve Stred · Rating 4 out of 5]

** Edited as review is now live on Kendall Reviews!**

Huh. This is my first foray into bizarro, and my immediate reaction is ‘Huh. I shouldn’t have liked that.’

This is absolutely the most insane love story I’ve ever read and I think at its core Slater phenomenally relays the pure unhinged emotions we can go through during love.

Each chapter itself could be described as mini-vignettes, looking into the main characters life, as things continue to spiral down and down and down.

He can’t get his life back to where he needs it but he tries, good lord does he try. Along the way we are introduced to some truly absurd characters and Slater does a great job of lowing the depressive tone by making them over the top. Some of the dialogue is comedy gold and will have you smiling and even laughing out loud.

I don’t see myself pursuing much more bizarro, but that’s a personal choice, not a reflection on this work.

If you’re looking for a really well done, oddly emotional take on just how over our heads we humans can find ourselves dealing with love, I definitely recommend this quick read.

[Douglas Hackle · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extended metaphor, I Will Rot Without You is the story of Ernie Cotard, a man whose body and world fall apart around him after a particularly bad breakup from a particularly poisonous relationship. Peppered with moments of dark and silly humor, the story is one of vivid grotesquery and body horror galore: sentient mold, plotting cockroaches, an old man who keeps his dead wife strung up in his apartment like a puppet, a woman marked with the severed, sewed-on parts of her jealous boyfriend, and again, the gradual and ghastly dissolution of the protag.

Any criticisms I have of IWRWY are pretty subjective. For example, Slater often employs a rich, lyrical prose style here. Most of the time this was a good thing, and I found myself enjoying the feast of words. However, there were moments where I thought the prose steered a wee bit on the purple side, where some of the many descriptive similes and metaphors in the book came off a little clunky and/or forced, and where swapping out a few of those fifty-cent words for two-cent alternatives might’ve worked better both aesthetically and denotatively. Also, a little more backstory concerning Ernie and Gretchen’s relationship and more fleshing out of their characters probably wouldn’t have hurt the book either. Again, completely subjective stuff.

The ending of IWRWY was both insane and satisfying. I also really liked the character of Cross the cockroach. Abandoning the more lighthearted quirkiness and zaniness that characterizes some of his earlier efforts, namely DangerRAMA and Love Me (0984612742), Slater delves into decidedly darker and more “serious” territory here in IWRWY, but continues to deliver the goods, adding yet another entertaining, memorable, and wonderfully weird story to his oeuvre.

[Emma Alice Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Danger Slater rules. In I Will Rot Without You, he's able to create that perfect combination of emotion and gross-out. It's my holy grail.

[Tessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, this one does get pretty disgusting and I had to take a break for awhile to get my bearings. But it was still a wild, bizarre ride that I'm happy to have taken. Puppet Skin is still my favorite Slater, but we will see if it stays at the top of my list as I continue through his oeuvre. READ THIS AND PREPARE TO LAUGH OUT LOUD, THROW UP & MORE!

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, I want to say that this book is exactly what I wanted to read without knowing it. I’ve gotten through a number of books and collections over the past few months, and none of them stood out so prominently as Danger Slater’s I Will Rot Without You.

It plays out like a really good and really weird art house film, only minus the pretension. The pace is frenetic, making it compulsively readable, and it manages to be both intelligent and funny without one component overshadowing the other. It inhabits a no man’s land between genres, seamlessly blending elements of body horror, romance, and existential malaise. And all of these things combine to create a fully realized portrait of a failed relationship.

Despite its strangeness, the book still resonates and the weirdness actually makes it all the more vivid, like a painter who transforms an everyday object into something distorted and nearly unrecognizable, forcing the viewer to examine it from a fresh, unique perspective.

The prose is masterful. Every page is filled with poetic and visceral descriptions. I can’t even count how many sentences had me nodding and smiling at how good they were. In short, this book blew me away.

Without spoiling anything, the ending is perfect. Slater manages to communicate love and its collapse with such ease and clarity that--it was at this point I realized--he’s the kind of writer that all other writers aspire to be.

I wish I had something to critique about this book because I didn’t want to sound insincere, but I Will Rot Without You struck all the right chords with me. I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re into good writing, Bizarro, the weird, or just want to experience something new, give this book a try. You will not regret it.

[William M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a great example of what a Bizarro story can be. All the great elements of what roughly defines Bizarro can be found in I Will Rot Without You. Besides Carlton Mellick, Danger Slater is probably the best writer I have discovered that can handle this genre with complete command and make it look easy. Anyone interested in giving this weird fiction style a chance would do well to start with this book. Slater takes the common themes of pain, regret, and loneliness of life after a difficult breakup and thrusts the reader into a wildly imaginative story involving some very memorable characters and loads of nasty, sticky scenes of bugs and bodily fluid. One of the best Bizarro books of the year and easily one of the best writers in this field. The only glaring issue I had were a number of typos that should have been caught before publication. Hopefully Slater's next book will get a few more reads from pre-readers and editors before going to press.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like Danger Slater's writing and I was expecting a fun and disgusting little book, but I wasn't prepared to be quite this impressed. It's gross and funny, but that comes together with the story in what I found to be the most accomplished writing I've seen from Danger Slater yet. I sat down to read a little bit and steamed right through until the end. It really is a story about being alive as a human in a way I've never seen someone tell it before. This is a seriously memorable work.

[Stephanie Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfectly perverse and lovely, perfectly Danger Slater. Absolutely loved it.

[Cassie Daley · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Philip Athans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this intense and oddly moving novella directly from the author, via Twitter, and I was surprised by the subtlety and sensitivity of it--just under the layer of "bizarro" strangeness and overt but somehow not gratuitous body horror. Though I've found other attempts at so-called bizarro books difficult to get through, the only thing I struggled with reading I Will Rot Without You was its desperate, bordering on inexcusable need for a thorough copy edit.

[Nicholas Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m giving this book three and a half stars, round it up to four on goodreads. This was a weird love story that had tons of funny dark moments in it. I only gave it such a rating because it kind of fizzled out at the end. I really enjoyed this book though and highly recommend it to anyone who needs a good laugh.

The audiobook gets five stars for me. The narrator did a fantastic job and kept me in the story. Fantastic job.