"She always said that she would use a gun if she did it, but she lied. She was too concerned about staying pretty. What men thought. If I told her what she looked like dead, she would have been so embarrassed."

This is a highly experimental horror novel, that leans fully into being a novel of vagueness and subtlety. Reading The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty is like watching the precession of the dead, you simply cannot peel your eyes away from such a horrific sight. It's a really rather difficult novel to review, because, what even is this book? Is it a hyper messed up coming of age story? Is it the end of the world, is it possession? Is the devil of these pages real or purely metaphorical? For all of these questions we're fed nothing more than a tiny trail of breadcrumbs. Regardless of the conclusion you arrive at, one thing is clear, this novel is entirely without mercy. It's brutal, unforgiving and soaked in pure cruelty.

There's a captivating yet extremely depressing bleakness that shades this entire thing, it's absolutely gutting, it's completely and utterly obliterating and is one of the most harrowing reading experiences you'll ever get. The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty is a highly intoxicating read, there's just something about it that makes it impossible to stop. It's almost beautiful, how feral and ghoulish of a novel this is. The whole thing is entirely ambiguous, even as the book propels us towards its sickening conclusion, we're left in the dark. The only honest way to describe this novel is to say that it's an acid trip and a fever dream in a trailer park of a rotting town, everything is all so intense and grotesque and completely awful.

 

There's a ton of violence to this story but, instead of relying upon the gratuitous and shocking to deliver a fantastic experience, The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty is so very nuanced and complex, there's almost a gorgeousness to the way the violence is handled. As a novel it's as enthralling and barbaric as it is surreal and erotic, it even leans into an almost Bataillean edge. A deep, dark pit of existential dread consumes the pages of this novel as it bridges the gap between grit-lit and horror with philosophical musings. If trailer park horror isn't already a genre, it should be, and this should be the genre defining book - it's a pure work of art, it's absolutely fucking unnerving, it's the kind of book that will leave you reeling for breath, it's the kind of book that will linger in your mind for months after it's over.

"I thought of how if someone died, I would miss them, even if I'd killed them. How it's possible to now lament what hasn't yet been destroyed, because it will be destroyed and I will have a hand in it. Change is inevitable. Becoming rules being. And I am the source of its movement."