tl;dr: This is suuuper slow paced, has a lot of interesting characterization, and the most disgusting scenes I have read in my life. You probably already know if this is for you by now.

This book goes off a little from the usual horror to mix lengthy disgustingly detailed descriptions with slow paced emotional suffering.

The characters are greatly written, very complex, though I feel there could have been a little more resolution for the Monstrumologist himself, who at times was a truly despicable person and could have done with some clearer bettering. One of the most interesting characters only got introduced in the last third too, and he really added a lot to the dynamic, so he might have been interesting earlier on.

The horror in this is at times somewhat scary, and at times incredibly disgusting. This book doesn't really work by just putting the characters in tense and dangerous situations, it paints a truly dark pictures of a gloomy world and slowly instills fear of these creatures that honestly, in any other context, would look kind of dumb - but this book makes it work.

I wished that some of the sadly conventional tropes for the genre had been handled with a little more care. There was only one scene in that regard that left a negative impression on me, but well, it could have done without that one. That being said, all the other scenes were consistently well written and gripping, and a certain little twist at the very end spiced the story up one last time for me too.

Just don't read it at 2am.