Elliott Dunstan’s novel Grotesque is a beautifully crafted, gender fluid tale of outcasts and arcane power, old gods and hidden tunnels, monstrous inhumanity and startling tenderness. Its narrator, a patchwork golem working at a gothic BDSM club in a rough Cornish harbour town, longs for the return of the mage who’d created them two centuries earlier. But when they recover that mage’s stolen book of secrets from a descendant of someone from that distant past, the narrative takes a brutal Lovecraftian turn.