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Poor Damned Souls
Love, suspicion, necrosis...
The ticking of The Money Store's 15-minute safe, the hum of fluorescents over gray carpet, the afterimage of a browser window, the weight of someone else's breath in your throat. What is a betrayal and how far can it go? Does it count if you cheat with a dead girl?
Poor Damned Souls is a drowning that never ends, a bleak and violent look into the psychological spiral of a woman convinced her partner is cheating when he's actually killing, and her subsequent deep dive into murder and the circumstances that lead there.
The ticking of The Money Store's 15-minute safe, the hum of fluorescents over gray carpet, the afterimage of a browser window, the weight of someone else's breath in your throat. What is a betrayal and how far can it go? Does it count if you cheat with a dead girl?
Poor Damned Souls is a drowning that never ends, a bleak and violent look into the psychological spiral of a woman convinced her partner is cheating when he's actually killing, and her subsequent deep dive into murder and the circumstances that lead there.
- GenresHorror
206 pages, Paperback
Published March 25, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Author
Holy. Crap. This book was perfect
I hesitate to go into the plot that much with this because I would hate to rob you of the opportunity I had of going in blind and letting this amazing story build and build into a crescendo before you. Just know that if you put your fate in Charlene Elsby's hands, it's a safe bet that she'll take you on a wild journey in a completely unexpected way.
This is a story of obsession, revenge with a smattering of feminine rage, and a twisted sense of "good for her" energy. As dark and deranged as this story was, there's a twisted sense of humor about it that has a certain "laughing at a funeral" kind of aspect to it; you don't want to and you know you shouldn't but that just makes it harder to stifle giggles that come out.
Thank you, Charlene Elsby, for giving me the opportunity to check out this book early, and now I'm not gonna be able to stop yapping about it until I get everybody I know to read it.
I hesitate to go into the plot that much with this because I would hate to rob you of the opportunity I had of going in blind and letting this amazing story build and build into a crescendo before you. Just know that if you put your fate in Charlene Elsby's hands, it's a safe bet that she'll take you on a wild journey in a completely unexpected way.
This is a story of obsession, revenge with a smattering of feminine rage, and a twisted sense of "good for her" energy. As dark and deranged as this story was, there's a twisted sense of humor about it that has a certain "laughing at a funeral" kind of aspect to it; you don't want to and you know you shouldn't but that just makes it harder to stifle giggles that come out.
Thank you, Charlene Elsby, for giving me the opportunity to check out this book early, and now I'm not gonna be able to stop yapping about it until I get everybody I know to read it.
January 30, 2026
*SPOILERS AHEAD, I RECOMMEND GOING IN BLIND*
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With her new novel, Charlene Elsby continues her custom of championing the poor, the tired, the overlooked, the cheated and cheated on, the exploited, the dark horse, the morbidly witty, the meticulously obsessive, the unhinged, the violently perverted, the Poor Damned Souls that find no redemption, only retribution.. and then some.
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With her new novel, Charlene Elsby continues her custom of championing the poor, the tired, the overlooked, the cheated and cheated on, the exploited, the dark horse, the morbidly witty, the meticulously obsessive, the unhinged, the violently perverted, the Poor Damned Souls that find no redemption, only retribution.. and then some.
March 26, 2026
She printed the dick first.
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: Poor Damned Souls is the working-class horror novel that has no business being this funny or this smart, and Charlene Elsby knows it. A payday loan clerk installs a keylogger on her cheating husband’s computer and finds something worse than an affair. The first two-thirds are nearly perfect. The third act will sort your readership for you. Highly recommended to everyone who survives it.
The first third of Poor Damned Souls is a masterclass in a genre that doesn’t have a name yet. Call it payday loan noir. Call it cheating-husband surveillance thriller. Call it whatever you want, but understand that for a long stretch of this book you are inside the skull of an unnamed woman working the morning shift at a Canadian check-cashing store called The Money Store, and she has just found her husband Scott’s dick on a bondage website, and she is going to handle this with institutional precision. She has access to a “Verification Centre,” which is just a computer in the back where they look people up, and she uses it the way god intended: to compile a dossier on the man she sleeps next to every night. She prints everything. The dick comes first. That feels important.
This is the book’s setup and it is tremendous. The narrator discovers Scott is cheating. She installs a keylogger on his computer using the activation command ALT+DEL+SKANK and waits. She discovers he may have done worse than cheat. She finds a dead woman in the news, a woman named Julia, 34, found in a river, whose folder of intimate pictures lives inside Scott’s laptop under a directory called “Human Resources.” At this point, Elsby is writing something that feels like dark comedy crossed with a procedural crossed with the most specific domestic horror you’ve ever read, and the whole thing crackles because the prose refuses to separate the mundane from the catastrophic. The narrator counts cash with the same methodical voice she uses to plan a murder. She thinks about whether to smoke in the panic room (the bathroom) with the same calm attention she brings to deciding how to disable Scott’s phone. Everything receives exactly as much weight. This is both the book’s greatest strength and, eventually, part of what works against it.
Charlene Elsby is a philosopher by training, formerly the Philosophy Program Director at Purdue University Fort Wayne and now, per her bio, working for the Canadian government, which feels like either a cover story or the most interesting hiring decision a government has ever made. Her debut Hexis established the template she’s been refining ever since: an unnamed woman, an interior monologue of extraordinary density, violence described with the same flat precision as housekeeping, and a philosophical throughline that keeps the whole thing from being mere provocation. Psychros, Musos, Violent Faculties, The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty — she’s been shockingly prolific, and across all of it the voice is consistent: acerbic, funny, ruthless, and philosophically serious about what it means to be a woman living inside systems that will absorb her labor and her body alike. In fact, make sure you check out The Organization Is Here to Support You, one of BWAF’s favorite books from last year.
Poor Damned Souls is the class novel, more explicitly than anything she’s written before. The Money Store is not backdrop. It’s the whole argument. What it means to sell money to the people who can least afford it. What it does to you, the person behind the glass, when you understand the system and still have to run it. This is Elsby’s most grounded book, and in its first two-thirds, her sharpest.
There’s a moment maybe a third of the way through where the narrator is running through the Verification Centre on a customer while simultaneously looking up Julia’s records, trying to connect her to Scott, and she pieces together the contours of Julia’s life from public records: the lease, the restarted social media accounts, the comments on her profile picture. “You look tired. Great, for your age!” The narrator hates Julia with a focus that is also, unmistakably, recognition. This is the texture the book nails. Another scene: the narrator crawling out of bed to check the keylogger, going cylindrical, trying not to jostle the mattress, calculating rotations, committing to a fall she can’t catch. The physical specificity of a woman trying to disappear inside her own apartment. And then: the list of reasons why murder is wrong, which she eventually dissolves in a bowl of water and mashes into pulp. The list is funny. The pulping is funny. What comes after is not.
Here is where we have to talk about the third act, because it is a different book. I’m going to spoil some shit because I think it’s necessary to discuss. The narrator and Scott go to kill Megan together, and what follows is extended, graphic, philosophically structured transgression that Elsby commits to completely and which will lose readers in approximately the same proportion it gains them. I don’t think it’s a failure of nerve. The vivisection scene is doing something: it’s the logical extension of the novel’s argument about what happens when you strip away all the systems that make violence illegible, all the abstractions that let us pretend people aren’t meat. The narrator is looking for the thing inside Megan that Scott wanted. She doesn’t find it, because it isn’t there, and that’s the point. But the explicit content runs long, and the build that made the first two-thirds so propulsive dissipates into something more static.
The voice throughout is worth whatever friction the finale generates. This is a narrator so good you feel robbed when the book ends. She notices things. She’s almost unbearably funny about her own catastrophe and almost unbearably lucid about what the world did to her before she decided to do anything back. If Poor Damned Souls doesn’t quite stick the landing, it’s because the first two-thirds set a standard the bloodbath can’t sustain. But I’d rather read a book that tries for something and wobbles than one that coasts. Elsby is constitutionally incapable of coasting, and that counts for a lot.
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: Poor Damned Souls is the working-class horror novel that has no business being this funny or this smart, and Charlene Elsby knows it. A payday loan clerk installs a keylogger on her cheating husband’s computer and finds something worse than an affair. The first two-thirds are nearly perfect. The third act will sort your readership for you. Highly recommended to everyone who survives it.
The first third of Poor Damned Souls is a masterclass in a genre that doesn’t have a name yet. Call it payday loan noir. Call it cheating-husband surveillance thriller. Call it whatever you want, but understand that for a long stretch of this book you are inside the skull of an unnamed woman working the morning shift at a Canadian check-cashing store called The Money Store, and she has just found her husband Scott’s dick on a bondage website, and she is going to handle this with institutional precision. She has access to a “Verification Centre,” which is just a computer in the back where they look people up, and she uses it the way god intended: to compile a dossier on the man she sleeps next to every night. She prints everything. The dick comes first. That feels important.
This is the book’s setup and it is tremendous. The narrator discovers Scott is cheating. She installs a keylogger on his computer using the activation command ALT+DEL+SKANK and waits. She discovers he may have done worse than cheat. She finds a dead woman in the news, a woman named Julia, 34, found in a river, whose folder of intimate pictures lives inside Scott’s laptop under a directory called “Human Resources.” At this point, Elsby is writing something that feels like dark comedy crossed with a procedural crossed with the most specific domestic horror you’ve ever read, and the whole thing crackles because the prose refuses to separate the mundane from the catastrophic. The narrator counts cash with the same methodical voice she uses to plan a murder. She thinks about whether to smoke in the panic room (the bathroom) with the same calm attention she brings to deciding how to disable Scott’s phone. Everything receives exactly as much weight. This is both the book’s greatest strength and, eventually, part of what works against it.
Charlene Elsby is a philosopher by training, formerly the Philosophy Program Director at Purdue University Fort Wayne and now, per her bio, working for the Canadian government, which feels like either a cover story or the most interesting hiring decision a government has ever made. Her debut Hexis established the template she’s been refining ever since: an unnamed woman, an interior monologue of extraordinary density, violence described with the same flat precision as housekeeping, and a philosophical throughline that keeps the whole thing from being mere provocation. Psychros, Musos, Violent Faculties, The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty — she’s been shockingly prolific, and across all of it the voice is consistent: acerbic, funny, ruthless, and philosophically serious about what it means to be a woman living inside systems that will absorb her labor and her body alike. In fact, make sure you check out The Organization Is Here to Support You, one of BWAF’s favorite books from last year.
Poor Damned Souls is the class novel, more explicitly than anything she’s written before. The Money Store is not backdrop. It’s the whole argument. What it means to sell money to the people who can least afford it. What it does to you, the person behind the glass, when you understand the system and still have to run it. This is Elsby’s most grounded book, and in its first two-thirds, her sharpest.
There’s a moment maybe a third of the way through where the narrator is running through the Verification Centre on a customer while simultaneously looking up Julia’s records, trying to connect her to Scott, and she pieces together the contours of Julia’s life from public records: the lease, the restarted social media accounts, the comments on her profile picture. “You look tired. Great, for your age!” The narrator hates Julia with a focus that is also, unmistakably, recognition. This is the texture the book nails. Another scene: the narrator crawling out of bed to check the keylogger, going cylindrical, trying not to jostle the mattress, calculating rotations, committing to a fall she can’t catch. The physical specificity of a woman trying to disappear inside her own apartment. And then: the list of reasons why murder is wrong, which she eventually dissolves in a bowl of water and mashes into pulp. The list is funny. The pulping is funny. What comes after is not.
Here is where we have to talk about the third act, because it is a different book. I’m going to spoil some shit because I think it’s necessary to discuss. The narrator and Scott go to kill Megan together, and what follows is extended, graphic, philosophically structured transgression that Elsby commits to completely and which will lose readers in approximately the same proportion it gains them. I don’t think it’s a failure of nerve. The vivisection scene is doing something: it’s the logical extension of the novel’s argument about what happens when you strip away all the systems that make violence illegible, all the abstractions that let us pretend people aren’t meat. The narrator is looking for the thing inside Megan that Scott wanted. She doesn’t find it, because it isn’t there, and that’s the point. But the explicit content runs long, and the build that made the first two-thirds so propulsive dissipates into something more static.
The voice throughout is worth whatever friction the finale generates. This is a narrator so good you feel robbed when the book ends. She notices things. She’s almost unbearably funny about her own catastrophe and almost unbearably lucid about what the world did to her before she decided to do anything back. If Poor Damned Souls doesn’t quite stick the landing, it’s because the first two-thirds set a standard the bloodbath can’t sustain. But I’d rather read a book that tries for something and wobbles than one that coasts. Elsby is constitutionally incapable of coasting, and that counts for a lot.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 28, 2026
Go into this book blind.
March 30, 2026
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - 𝓻𝓪𝓽𝓮
🌶️- 𝓼𝓹𝓲𝓬𝓮
🔥🔥🔥 - 𝓹𝓵𝓸𝓽
🩸🩸 - 𝓰𝓸𝓻𝓮
🖤 𝓶𝓪𝓲𝓷 𝓬𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓪𝓬𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓼🖤
Unnamed Female & Scott
🖤 𝓽𝓻𝓸𝓹𝓮𝓼🖤
📕feminine rage
📕infidelity
📕obsession
📕’good for her’
📕unhinged main characters
🖤 𝓻𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀🖤
“Does it count if you cheat with a dead girl?”
As an avid reader of Elsby, I went into this book blind. Because with her books, you want to do just that in order to experience her writing to the fullest intent. The build up. The roller coaster of the protagonist spiraling into madness was perfectly executed with a finale that will shock you with the bleakness but also the climatic ending of our main we have been following the entire time. The realness of the wife at home discovering her husband’s infidelity drives her to further investigate into his whereabouts, as she herself psychological descent into madness.
*spoilers*
We are introduced to our protagonist who has a sinking feeling about the infidelity of her husband. Going so far as to sneak onto his computer while he is away to look through his log ins and anything else she can get access to. All while working around her increasingly busy schedule at The Money Store, where her own boss makes her do more work than any other employ.
But while looking in at his life away from her, she notices messages to a woman she discovers has been found deceased. Examining the case and the times her husband wasn’t home, she pieces together that it must have been him that took her life. Everything spirals heavier into madness when she finds out he has started to talk to another woman. Even appearing in person in a public space.
The first two acts, Poor and Damned, build up the suspense. Build up the insanity behind her own thoughts as she dives deeper into his recreational lifestyle. Unlocking closeted demons as she herself spirals into a lunacy you won’t see coming during the third act. It’s perfectly executed by Elsby by how she describes the last punch of sanity our main has before she finally cuts ties and allows herself to feel how Scott did when he killed the other two girls.
This book is an unhinged pile of chaos that evolves into madness by the third act. It feels like you’re deteriorating alongside this woman who just wants to feel something from the man she married. It’s quick paced and Elsby brings the gore full-swing during the climax that will have you seated. A must-read from the author who brought Musos and Violent Faculties.
🌶️- 𝓼𝓹𝓲𝓬𝓮
🔥🔥🔥 - 𝓹𝓵𝓸𝓽
🩸🩸 - 𝓰𝓸𝓻𝓮
🖤 𝓶𝓪𝓲𝓷 𝓬𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓪𝓬𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓼🖤
Unnamed Female & Scott
🖤 𝓽𝓻𝓸𝓹𝓮𝓼🖤
📕feminine rage
📕infidelity
📕obsession
📕’good for her’
📕unhinged main characters
🖤 𝓻𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀🖤
“Does it count if you cheat with a dead girl?”
As an avid reader of Elsby, I went into this book blind. Because with her books, you want to do just that in order to experience her writing to the fullest intent. The build up. The roller coaster of the protagonist spiraling into madness was perfectly executed with a finale that will shock you with the bleakness but also the climatic ending of our main we have been following the entire time. The realness of the wife at home discovering her husband’s infidelity drives her to further investigate into his whereabouts, as she herself psychological descent into madness.
*spoilers*
We are introduced to our protagonist who has a sinking feeling about the infidelity of her husband. Going so far as to sneak onto his computer while he is away to look through his log ins and anything else she can get access to. All while working around her increasingly busy schedule at The Money Store, where her own boss makes her do more work than any other employ.
But while looking in at his life away from her, she notices messages to a woman she discovers has been found deceased. Examining the case and the times her husband wasn’t home, she pieces together that it must have been him that took her life. Everything spirals heavier into madness when she finds out he has started to talk to another woman. Even appearing in person in a public space.
The first two acts, Poor and Damned, build up the suspense. Build up the insanity behind her own thoughts as she dives deeper into his recreational lifestyle. Unlocking closeted demons as she herself spirals into a lunacy you won’t see coming during the third act. It’s perfectly executed by Elsby by how she describes the last punch of sanity our main has before she finally cuts ties and allows herself to feel how Scott did when he killed the other two girls.
This book is an unhinged pile of chaos that evolves into madness by the third act. It feels like you’re deteriorating alongside this woman who just wants to feel something from the man she married. It’s quick paced and Elsby brings the gore full-swing during the climax that will have you seated. A must-read from the author who brought Musos and Violent Faculties.
Review of advance copy received from Author
@Charlene Elsby is a true master of her craft, a scholar and a friend. She graciously provided me with a physical ARC for reviewing purposes. All views and opinions are my own. ALL HAIL THE VOID…
*This is an excerpt from the review posted to my substack (link in bio)*
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Charlene imbues Poor Damned Souls with the same Transgressive terror and wonderfully dark humor, that can be found in previous works such as “Violent Faculties”, “RED FLAGS” and “The Organization is here to Help You”, to name a few.
PDS plays out amidst a landscape of Modern Canadian banality. There is nothing special about the setting, or the people. Therein lies both the humor and the horror, which is spread throughout Charlene’s book like an unseen network of pulsing veins and nerves. It’s the many tones of beige hued landscape of Urban Patriarchal Society. The Men in this story could be some schmuck you pass on your into a gas station, or flip off as they cut you off in traffic. They carry the illusion of menace, of power of danger. But that’s all it is, illusion. Patriarchal society operates under the societal assumption that the the predators, the things with teeth, are everywhere. Those that don’t want to become food, choose to hide, to camouflage, or to go with the flow.
But hunters evolve to camouflage as well. PDS shows us a glimpse into what happens, when the older, stronger thing, that navigates the modern world of Patriarchy, awakens. When she sheds her passive exterior, her false self. The transformation ,and what follows, is nothing short of a brutal, primal reckoning. Charlene “hammers this all home” with a wicked grin, that shines through her prose.
Poor Damned Souls is due out in March from Aterism books/ Merigold Independent. Do yourself a favor, and Pre-order a copy. The way things are sitting in the world today, I’d recommend snagging copies for every female presenting person in your life.
Pre-order it here:
https://asterismbooks.com/product/poo...
*This is an excerpt from the review posted to my substack (link in bio)*
-
Charlene imbues Poor Damned Souls with the same Transgressive terror and wonderfully dark humor, that can be found in previous works such as “Violent Faculties”, “RED FLAGS” and “The Organization is here to Help You”, to name a few.
PDS plays out amidst a landscape of Modern Canadian banality. There is nothing special about the setting, or the people. Therein lies both the humor and the horror, which is spread throughout Charlene’s book like an unseen network of pulsing veins and nerves. It’s the many tones of beige hued landscape of Urban Patriarchal Society. The Men in this story could be some schmuck you pass on your into a gas station, or flip off as they cut you off in traffic. They carry the illusion of menace, of power of danger. But that’s all it is, illusion. Patriarchal society operates under the societal assumption that the the predators, the things with teeth, are everywhere. Those that don’t want to become food, choose to hide, to camouflage, or to go with the flow.
But hunters evolve to camouflage as well. PDS shows us a glimpse into what happens, when the older, stronger thing, that navigates the modern world of Patriarchy, awakens. When she sheds her passive exterior, her false self. The transformation ,and what follows, is nothing short of a brutal, primal reckoning. Charlene “hammers this all home” with a wicked grin, that shines through her prose.
Poor Damned Souls is due out in March from Aterism books/ Merigold Independent. Do yourself a favor, and Pre-order a copy. The way things are sitting in the world today, I’d recommend snagging copies for every female presenting person in your life.
Pre-order it here:
https://asterismbooks.com/product/poo...
Review of advance copy received from Author
With Poor Damned Souls, Charlene Elsby once again comes in swinging, and what she swings is a scalpel aimed at the metaphysical flaccid dick of mediocre male supremacy.
In the novel, we follow a protagonist who seems to be beaten down from every sphere of life. Her road to higher education is cut short, her income at a money lender is barely enough to scrape by, her family background and adolescent are fraught and abusive, and her partner is a fucking loser who's bad at sex and just happens to be a murderer.
All of these forces catalyze to push the protagonist over the edge. As with some of Elsby's other leading ladies, what we have in this story is a character who has found her conditions to be entirely intolerable, and, finding them such, they react, they make any choice, and they stop being passive experiencers of the world and become agents, wilful beings attempting to assert freedom.
It's just that...the reaction we get in Poor Damned Souls is cataclysmic. The protagonist spirals into paranoia only to have her worst fears confirmed, and from there? Well, they don't call this subgenre femgore for nothing. Remember that scalpel? Charlene is as mercilessly incisive as usual in Poor Damned Souls, but I think the world portrayed in this novel is probably the ugliest among them, and that portrayal, expressed through the narrator, makes everything in this book, no matter how insane, feel entirely natural.
Anyway, if you like stories about smart women put upon by the world and lashing out, Pour Damned Souls will hit you with those lashes, and you'll fuckin like it.
Oh, it's also really funny (in a morbid way for weird little sickos, of course).
In the novel, we follow a protagonist who seems to be beaten down from every sphere of life. Her road to higher education is cut short, her income at a money lender is barely enough to scrape by, her family background and adolescent are fraught and abusive, and her partner is a fucking loser who's bad at sex and just happens to be a murderer.
All of these forces catalyze to push the protagonist over the edge. As with some of Elsby's other leading ladies, what we have in this story is a character who has found her conditions to be entirely intolerable, and, finding them such, they react, they make any choice, and they stop being passive experiencers of the world and become agents, wilful beings attempting to assert freedom.
It's just that...the reaction we get in Poor Damned Souls is cataclysmic. The protagonist spirals into paranoia only to have her worst fears confirmed, and from there? Well, they don't call this subgenre femgore for nothing. Remember that scalpel? Charlene is as mercilessly incisive as usual in Poor Damned Souls, but I think the world portrayed in this novel is probably the ugliest among them, and that portrayal, expressed through the narrator, makes everything in this book, no matter how insane, feel entirely natural.
Anyway, if you like stories about smart women put upon by the world and lashing out, Pour Damned Souls will hit you with those lashes, and you'll fuckin like it.
Oh, it's also really funny (in a morbid way for weird little sickos, of course).
Review of advance copy received from Author
Charlene Elsby keeps raising the bar on herself.
Poor Damned Souls is still reckless, still excessive, still willing to make you complicit in its worst impulses, but something fundamental has shifted. The academic scaffolding is mostly gone. No more hiding behind theory like it’s bulletproof glass. This time the poverty is material. It’s financial. It’s cultural. It’s the kind that predates self-awareness and quietly scripts your personality before you realize you’re auditioning.
Her protagonist is intelligent enough to recognize the trap and still powerless enough to stay inside it. That tension is the engine. The familiar descent into cruelty is here, but it doesn't feel like an intellectual exercice. It feels inevitable. This feels like a breakthrough in honesty, even if it will never be a breakout in popularity. It’s too abrasive. Too abject. It doesn’t want to be loved, it wants to be endured.
If this were a film, people wouldn’t admit they watched it. They’d download it at 2AM on Pirate Bay and pretend they found it by accident.
Poor Damned Souls is still reckless, still excessive, still willing to make you complicit in its worst impulses, but something fundamental has shifted. The academic scaffolding is mostly gone. No more hiding behind theory like it’s bulletproof glass. This time the poverty is material. It’s financial. It’s cultural. It’s the kind that predates self-awareness and quietly scripts your personality before you realize you’re auditioning.
Her protagonist is intelligent enough to recognize the trap and still powerless enough to stay inside it. That tension is the engine. The familiar descent into cruelty is here, but it doesn't feel like an intellectual exercice. It feels inevitable. This feels like a breakthrough in honesty, even if it will never be a breakout in popularity. It’s too abrasive. Too abject. It doesn’t want to be loved, it wants to be endured.
If this were a film, people wouldn’t admit they watched it. They’d download it at 2AM on Pirate Bay and pretend they found it by accident.
May 21, 2026
The violent acts in Elsby's novels seem like the only way out when viewed at through the perspective of her narrators. Elsby thoroughly interrogates the motives and intentions of the damaged individuals in her stories. Like watching a rat crawling through a maze where the exits toward something better are slowly cordoned off one by one until there is only one path.
Base desires are poked and prodded at in this book. Enough death and sex mesh to make Bataille blush. And then she'll throw a left hook with a line like, "It's weird how we all want the same things, but some people won't admit it."
Base desires are poked and prodded at in this book. Enough death and sex mesh to make Bataille blush. And then she'll throw a left hook with a line like, "It's weird how we all want the same things, but some people won't admit it."
Review of advance copy received from Author
Elsby once again proves why women are the champions of horror.
Trust me when I tell you it is best to go into this one blind. Let yourself get slowly wrapped up in the obsessive paranoia of an all too relatable MC.
Full of female rage, violence, dark humor, and accurate representation of living in poverty with a useless man-baby. It was a horrific honor to be able to read an advance copy sent to me by the author.
Trust me when I tell you it is best to go into this one blind. Let yourself get slowly wrapped up in the obsessive paranoia of an all too relatable MC.
Full of female rage, violence, dark humor, and accurate representation of living in poverty with a useless man-baby. It was a horrific honor to be able to read an advance copy sent to me by the author.
June 27, 2026
More like 3.5 stars. It’s more like a clever concept than a perfect execution. The end goes on way too long, so does the beginning. A slower realization and a more grounded character de-evolution should be legible to the reader, tho I will say it already walked a pretty delicate balance. I can’t say for certain anything about the last 25 pages and I don’t think that is to its benefit.
Review of advance copy received from Author
After reading so many of her books, I didn't realize Charlene could still shock me so much, but god damn. Poor Damned Souls is at times laugh out loud funny, often very sad and far too relatable. Satisfying and deeply upsetting.
Review of advance copy received from Author
I was deceived by the first 60%…it had me far too absorbed, reflecting on my time going through a divorce…wondering how Charlene captured my internal monologue so completely
Then the bottom dropped out
And the free fall was gloriously messy
Then the bottom dropped out
And the free fall was gloriously messy
May 19, 2026
I am so often disappointed by the prose in books like this, but this was such a good read. I really enjoyed being in the main character’s head and feeling like I was getting caught up in her obsession alongside her. very icky, very good.
April 19, 2026
This is the most disturbing thing I've read in a while. First half was a little slow, but boy does it ramp up.
May 29, 2026
i don’t know i wanted to like it but all i felt was a strong, persistent, and ever growing annoyance at the narrator. i appreciate the commitment to the ending though
June 1, 2026
Got violently ill the night I finished this book.
Could’ve been food poisoning.
Maybe.
Could’ve been food poisoning.
Maybe.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews