A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Hoover is a huge bestseller and has an immense TikTok following, so I decided to check out her most popular novel, Verity. (It's also her darkest and she warns that people who like her other books might not like this one.) Oh boy was that a good decision. At least, it was a good decision for you. This book is NUTS.

Verity is absolutely batshit literally from page one.

It opens with one of the most accidentally hilarious scenes I have ever read. Lowen, a midlist writer who moved to New York City ten years ago, sees a man fall in traffic and get his head "crushed like a grape." His head "pops like a champagne cork!" She's splattered with blood!

...and all the New Yorkers totally ignore this, because New Yorkers are so hardened that seeing a man's skull get unexpectedly crushed and blood splatter everywhere isn't worth a backward glance.

Her own reaction to this is to muse on New Yorkers vs other people.

A hot dude, Jeremy, helps her exchange her blood-splattered shirt for his so she can get to her job interview, mentioning that he wasn't bothered by the guy's head exploding in front of him because he's seen worse things.

I assumed he meant he was a combat veteran because war is literally the only way anyone ever gets used to heads exploding. Instead, he says his eight-year-old daughter drowned in a lake.

...okay, yes, that is more traumatic than seeing a stranger's head explode. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN YOU'RE USED TO HEADS EXPLODING! I HAVE SEEN A BUNCH OF CORPSES BUT I WOULD STILL BE FREAKED OUT IF SOMEONE'S HEAD WAS UNEXPECTEDLY CRUSHED IN FRONT OF ME!

Lowen rushes to her job interview, which coincidentally is with Jeremy. He is the husband of bestselling author Verity, who was disabled in a car crash and is unable to finish her book series. Lowen is hired to finish it for her. For literally no reason it's a big secret that Verity was injured so this is announced as her randomly collaborating with Lowen.

At this point I started liveblogging over email:

- We have just learned that Jeremy has TWO dead daughters, not one. They were twins who died six months apart.

Also, the heroine's mother just died slowly of colon cancer.

- Lowen is now staying at the house of the Jeremy and his mysteriously disabled wife Verity. She has been placed in the master bedroom, which has human toothmarks on the headboard, she presumes from extremely hot sex.

- Verity is in a coma. I'm calling it now: she murdered the kids and framed her husband, and she's faking the coma.

Lowen discovers that Verity has written a memoir, which she proceeds to read veeeery sloooooowly, at a pace of one chapter per day maximum. The revelations about Verity all come from the memoir.

Spoiler cut. ( Read more... )

The exploding head has nothing to do with anything, except for a thematic thing about some people having lots of random bad stuff happen to them.

I can tell why Verity is a bestseller despite being batshit, melodramatic, and kind of nonsensical: it is pretty compelling reading. I finished it in a day.