what made me think 'you know, i wanna read another book by eric larocca' was the itch to read something disturbing, something that creeps you out the same way 'things have gotten worse since we last spoke' does. but ngl this one was a bit of a flop. i feel like there was potential but it was honestly like reading a brainstorm of ideas rather than an actual book. but maybe that was the point??

writing style already put me off a bit. there were multiple times i had to cringe because it felt so contrived in a way? with what the theme turns out to be, about the nature of plagiarism and putting up smoke and mirrors using others' ideas to hide your true self, maybe the way all the important details were so on the nose while random things were left mysterious just for suspense were purposeful. but personally i think you can make a theme clear through a story without making it literally pulling teeth to read.

i think bc of that it made it pretty hard to really feel the impact of what could've been very intense scenes. i just didnt care about what was going on because i felt like the story was asking for reactions from me that were not deserved. like, for example, the first scene with tamsen trying to run away from presley had me HOOKED. and either it was organised in a way that was too confusing to pick up on, but as there continued to be moments where tamsen had a weird reaction about presley without any release of the tension, it just started to feel old. the entire middle of the book kind of feels like a muddle of weird happenings that *should* have been unsettling but just didnt really hit because youre too busy wondering if the other things left untied would make sense soon. the alternations between the work written by martyr and martyr's recordings of himself does not help that.

speaking of martyr, omg i rolled my eyes so hard. reading his thoughts felt like scrolling through a 2014 grunge blog on tumblr where op REALLY wants you to know how edgy and dark they are. the dialogue between tamsen and co were the same. painful to get through. 

i wouldnt say the ending was redeeming but it certainly didnt leave me feel like i wasted my time completely. i think the premise of a murderer that kills their victims because theyve plagiarised from them and reading what would've been the compilation of the voices of all their victims couldve been very interesting and original, especially with the questions it'd raise about the reliability of our current narrator and, really, any narrator. but the execution of this really fell flat. while it's entirely possible to say that how confusing and poorly written this book was could've been some kind of poetic statement that i just didnt underestand, i personally feel like if the metaphor youre using impacts the quality of your story as a whole, then maybe choose a different metaphor.