Ahh Homoween, the Qweer Christmas that let's the girls and the gays let their freak flag fly. And this month, we're getting positively grotesque with Alison Rumfitt's feral second novel, Brainwyrms !

In a near-future Britain on the verge of fascism (so, Tuesday), a ban against transness has just been announced. Frankie, a young trans woman, is reeling from the trauma of surviving a terrorist bombing at the gender identity clinic where she worked when, at a fetish club, she meets Vanya. The enigmatic online influencer's words infect as much as they inspire, and something cracks open in Frankie. What begins as a spark becomes a full-body possession. But Vanya is hiding more than just extreme kinks, and their love is curdling into something rotten, impossible to untangle from the world around them, where politics and parasites feed off of each other in equal measure.

The novel is a sickening lurch through the psychedelic landscapes of hatred, drawing parallels between -philias and -phobias and the ways in which desire / disgust may be two sides of the same obsessive coin. Alison uses body horror as a seething social prophecy of real-world terrors — grotesque, horny, and furious, BRAINWYRMS is not for the faint of heart. But this revolting study of ideological parasites is one you can't look away from, even as it eats you alive.

Because the worms are already inside you.

Content warnings for truly everything you could possibly think of, so tread with care.