The Divine Flesh by Drew Huff (Dark Matter INK)

This, quite frankly, one of the most astoundingly original books I’ve ever read.

We have a self-destructive drug addict (and mule) in Jennifer, who’s constantly fighting to control her own body because it’s also inhabited by a cosmic goddess older than anything. If that’s not enough, Jennifer’s former husband is in love with the goddess, and after he and his friends are killed by bigoted self-appointed vigilantes, Jennifer and the Divine Flesh go to track down the killers but end up dealing with conspiracies and festering human and non-human horrors while skirting ever closer to unleashing the Flesh on the world.

Both Jennifer and the Divine Flesh get first person POV treatment, and are often in conversation with one another, which adds to the interpersonal conflicts and motivations while furthering the plot.

It’s cosmic horror but built on a body horror framework, and how Huff manages to write so beautifully about the grotesque deserves five stars in and of itself, especially when the story becomes more abstract and dreamy (or nightmarish, depending on your perspective), reflecting more of what an immortal divine perspective must be like.

It was interesting how the Divine Flesh had a sort of adolescent attitude — after all, if you’re an immortal goddess, who’s ever going to tell you to grow up? But it explains her sort of playfulness when it comes to recreating and reimagining life forms; with no real limits on her power, she has a freedom to do things that would otherwise be unthinkable.

What’s monstrous to us is a game to her, and the concepts of good and evil are too binary to really apply to her.

I enjoyed also how the cosmic entities, despite their immense power and age, openly admit they don’t have all the answers, sometimes because they’ve been suppressed but at other times because they’ve forgotten things (which is kind of amazing as a concept).