Book Review: Bodies of Work by Clay McLeod Chapman
Genre: Horror
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
I was left feeling unimpressed by Bodies of Work. I can see where Chapman has taken inspiration from and get what he’s going for, but it fell flat. Maybe not enough to avoid the author, and I do still want to read some of his other work, but might be a while before I pick up the next one.
In Bodies of Work, we follow Winston Kemper, a 66-year-old man who lingers in the background, unnoticed and overlooked. When he returns from his work as a church janitor to his single room apartment, he focuses on his true life’s work – The Butterfly Girls, a multimedia fantasy that lives in any space Winston can find. The focus of this work is a group of young girls, taken from their world and deposited in a fantasy land, to discover they are now ‘butterfly girls’, a group enlisted in an ongoing war. Meanwhile, we get Winston’s story through the women he’s murdered, ghosts haunting him until they can enact their revenge.
It was a compelling premise, but the execution didn’t hold up. It felt too often like the book was tipping us more towards sympathy for Winston than the murdered women, who are often portrayed as one voice, a Greek chorus who do little except…talk about Winston. We get flashes of their lives but they all bleed together into one stereotypical clump of ‘forgotten women’. The fantasy sections were just weird, and not in a good, horror-weird way. All too often, I found myself bored, feeling like the pace was too slow despite the book being less than 200 pages.
Truthfully, I didn’t find Winston himself a remotely compelling or interesting character, and outside of Winston there isn’t much else going on in terms of character. If I had read this 15, 20 years ago, it might have intrigued me more, but in the 2020s, this book comes across flat and stale.
I read Bodies of Work for the Who Ya Gonna Call – Featuring Ghosts prompt in our DHR Reading Challenge – check out our Challenge page to find out more and see how you can take part.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter: @elleturpitt
Bluesky: @elleturpitt.bsky.social
I received this ebook from Titan Books via NetGalley for review consideration.
