I've been watching May Leitz's YouTube content for years now and always liked her coverage of grimy movies and shock media deep dives. So, when she ended up writing her first novel, the cover art sprouting a bunch of content warnings for full transparency, I knew I'd get into something filthy and dark, but for some reason I didn't quite expect what I got. It makes absolute sense that this story came out of this mind though.

Fluids is an ultra-vulgar, filthy tale of desperation, self-destruction, and human abysses. While it starts with introducing a deeply troubled but mostly sympathetic main character meeting a new girl on a dating platform who bond over their respective struggle to exist in this world, it eventually becomes clear that she is nothing but a bad influence on the other person. Blinded by a skewed and egocentric personal definition of the word love, what might have started as some sort of genuine affection and care turns more and more into a destructive spiral.
It's a deliberately over-the-top and chaotic exploration of someone shaped by trauma and gore media on the internet.
As the title suggests, the book is overflowing with bodily fluids of every kind and suffering is abundant. I read a lot of this book during my daily commutes and I'm prone to some travel sickness. I'm telling you, having that slight nausea mixed with the vile contents of the book was quite the experience.

This book is definitely not for everyone. It's genuinely disgusting and depressing. I wouldn't recommend reading this if you're not in a great place yourself.
The writing is a tiny bit stilted every now and then, but the author also has some creative ideas for metaphors and wordplay. For a debut novel, this is very well written overall and I really liked how it switched between the point-of-views of the two main characters. This was genuinely engaging and I really wanted to see where things were going.