I liked this one much more than the previous instalment. It was more cohesive and had a more linear story. In some ways it was even darker than The Tower. I dare not comment on the representation of PTSD but the constantly changing dynamic between the two characters makes for a good conversation starter for mental health; especially PTSD resulting from childhood trauma.

This was… not good. Aside from clearly telling and not showing, this story was unnecessarily explicit. I think body horror and erotica can be written well and excitingly, but everything in this story felt aggressive. I know it’s a short, but there were absolutely no stakes. It was not compelling. If an alien could be a manic pixie dream girl, that’s basically the plot of this story. One thing I will commend is that the main character definitely felt like a realistic male, though the character of Linda exactly reflects how I think a man would objectify a sexual assault victim (hypersexual, hysterical, begging for validation from men) when that’s just not the case in the real world.

After a while I started to sadly get bored with this little series. I pushed through so I could finish what I was given but I'm just not as invested anymore.

I really didn't realize what I was getting into with this book. It's very odd. And there are moments that are just gross. Narration is smooth. It was an instantly available audio book on Netgalley so I thought I'd give it a try. But it's just weird. I don't feel like I can give too much detail without spoiling it, but trust me. Weird. Also, if you are easily triggered, this is not the book for you. Some major trigger warnings include mental health, sexual situation, child abuse, sexual abuse, etc.

Thank you to Netgalley for the Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for my honest review.

This book was so freaky. It was super short and time flew by as I read it and I felt like I was losing my mind the whole time. I didn’t realize this was the 2nd in a series so after reading it, I purchased the first one and I will be purchasing the next as well.

Thank you to NetGalley for the audio ARC of White Fuzz buy William Pauley III.

Another bizarre, insane, fantastic segment of The Bedlam Bible. As always, Connor Brannighan brings these short stories to life in the most wonderful way.

White Fuzz was more sexual than the others from The Bedlam Bible I have read so far, but the content of this book looks at sexual abuse (trigger warning for those wanting to read).

The ending will have you :0 :0 :0

White Fuzz is the second book in the series The Bedlam Bible. As with many Pauley novels, this one is short, weird and wonderful. Franklin receives a mysterious text message from a stranger. Turns out, she is a neighbor in the Eighth Block Tower, and he goes over to her place. As they initiate a sort of romantic entanglement, weird (and gross) things start to happen. And when I say gross, I mean the description the author gave of the encounters were so vivid that I literally felt stomach sick.

A fun little read to listen to. Just make sure to wait to eat anything until afterward!

Tw: Pedophilia, incest, beastiality, references to abuse (child, sexual, domestic)

This is honestly the weirdest book that I have ever read in my life. I honestly don't know what to say except is be prepared for something very strange and expect nothing. Oh, I also wouldn't call this a love story, just erotic in ways that not a lot of people will enjoy.

Another bizarre book by William Pauley III, I wasn’t sure how to feel about this one- I don’t think it was the best one for me. It fits Pauley crazy writing style but I just wasn’t feeling it. It was just so odd but it hasn’t put me off exploring more of Pauleys writings.

I’ll definitely admit this one threw me a bit as it took a little bit of a different approach than the other two books in this series I have read. Rather than multiple shorter stories that weave together, this entire book follows one story. Every time I thought I knew where it was heading I was quickly reminded to never get too comfortable reading one of Pauley’s books- the regular rules of the world do not apply here. Definitely stick around with this one until the ending! I’m continuously surprised how much heart can go into these deeply strange and, at times, gruesome stories.

Take a trip through Eighth Block Tower and get to know some more of your neighbors- just be mindful of the salt in the halls.

Dang. Of the two Bedlam Bible volumes I've read now, this is hands down my favorite. Unlike the first volume, this one acts as a standalone tale in the eighth block tower. Readers of the first might assume something weird could happen at any moment, but the dialogue is so good they'll not see the ending coming.

So this is now a re read, and I’ll just say it features a character who ended up in a lot more stories than just this one.

I listened and I was struck by the art of storytelling. I thought of things we had to read at school as part of the English syllabus, but then you had no choice.
Lynda spelled with a y, at first bubbly and promised to be interesting and then turned needy and disturbed. Why did her home smell of death? She had my sympathy for what she had seen growing up. Do I believe her? Do I believe him?
I was glad that I did not have to go on reading. I was glad I had a choice to stop listening.
What was in the box, left when Lynda was nineteen by her fiance?
The book was advertised to me as science fiction, and science fiction must have different genres. The picture of the girl with the fuzzy brain was strategic and the strength of the book promising that the writer will soon land was suspense magic.

I received the audiobook version of this story via NetGalley.

Connor was great at narrating as with all the others in the series.

I ended up accidentally skipping this entry so I decided to return back to it after finishing all the others in the series.

I thought the story was great. It was on the shorter side so I was able to finish it in one sitting. It was all one story, unlike a few others in the Series which were more of a short story collection

I would consider this to be (I don’t want to say horror but) more on the horror side, at least comparatively. This entry was also kinda sad.

The ending was unexpected to say the least.

This story is intoxicating! I was glued to my headphones (this was an audiobook) and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It is a difficult and weir book, with a great ending. I totally recommend it, if you dare!

Messed up, and not in a way that manages to sound interesting, or that makes you reflect on what you just read; it somehow managed to be both disgusting and boring as hell.

["I sucked you off as 'a guy in my apartment building' before" she said. "That was fun, but now i want to suck you off as 'a writer'."]

Mmh. Weird kinks (you could actually just call them a mysoginist's wet dream!) that I would hope to be unrelated to the author.

The only two characters still manage to be as two-dimensional as possible, the woman even more than the man - be it because he's the narrator/pov character or because he's just male. He's a pathetic, condescending incel who thinks he's really being nonjudgemental while theorising diagnoses of mental illness for the girl (as if they aren't on the same boat anyway) and making himself the hero he isn't. There's also the heavy-handed presence of the male gaze and, in typical Pauley style, this time his shitty female character type was the manic pixie dream girl. At least he varies between them, I don't know what else to say.

[I stared helplessly at her ass, at the way the multicolored zebras illustrated on her pajama bottoms seemed in a way to be hugging her every curve. For a split second I fantasized jerking the waistband of her pants down around her knees and burying my face into her wet gash, tonguing hungrily at her cunt, but immediately suppressed the feeling. I was a man, after all, and a man’s brain was wired just like an animal’s. When faced with either hunger or lust, a man has to remind himself to be decent. Those who failed in suppressing their instincts were almost always labeled as monsters, and those who succeeded, well, those were the ones known as good men. I always thought of myself as one of the good men, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had my moments of shame.]

I could quote a million passages (mostly because the whole book is paved by those) documenting the male gaze mysoginist kink thing and you still couldn't see all the squallor I was put through. I'm going to quote only a bunch of them for our collective mental sanity.

[Her knees slipped on the slick surface of the washer lid, pulling her pants halfway down her backside, exposing her naked ass. She screamed as she fell back a few inches. Instinctually, I grabbed her legs to help her regain control, and immediately after doing so, dread sunk in. She’d assume I was a creep for sure. I was a total stranger, hugging her half- naked ass in her bathroom in the wee hours of the morning. Jesus. Why had I come here?
“Is my ass hanging out?” she asked, not sounding embarrassed at all.
“Um,” I mumbled. “Yeah. Yes, it is.”
She laughed and made no attempts at covering herself.]

[Most guys would probably have invited her over for the sole purpose of sleeping with her. I was never like that. I respected women too much. The only way we’d have sex tonight, even with her sleeping over, would be if she threw herself at me. I’d lose all self-control. I’m respectful, but still a man, after all.]

[“I saw your penis earlier. I’m sorry,” she said.
“What?” I asked, even though I heard every word she’d said.
“I watched you while you were in the bathroom,” she said, pushing the key into the deadbolt. “I saw your penis and it’s very nice. You should be proud.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“I’m sorry. That’s weird, I know,” she said. “But I felt guilty for watching you and thought you should know."]

No element of horror found, if not the one of me asking myself why I was wasting hours of my life on something I neither enjoyed nor found betterment in.

At the end the author seems to think that he did such A Thing™ to finish right back to where he started off; or maybe that he started right where he had finished (pretentious; it only works well when there was plot to begin with). He rushed in all the explanations hoping to bank on that shock value that somehow managed again to make me neither surprised nor satisfied, and on top of it all you have to count it being made to pass as romantic - just like all the instalove that popped out of nowhere every now and then.

[She dissolved just yesterday, and though I can’t fathom ever forgetting her, I‘ve decided to write down the details of our meeting, of those few precious hours, for the hours changed me…]

The ending was not enough to compensate both for what Lynda had to pass through and especially what I had to pass through.
The only element I seemed to enjoy at all was the setting (I'm talking about the tower itself, not even the apartments. Maybe the corridor by the end, it brought me relief more than it did to the slug and the guy both), and only because it was a pre-estabilished one from the other books of the series. But even then it was only quoted a couple of times.
In my opinion, the author should stick to short stories. The shorter the better, I'm serious; looking back to the ones I enjoyed so far, they really were the shorter ones. He's good at those, especially because he doesn't have to make space for women.
Not even Brannigan could make me enjoy this one, folks. If possible, I found the whole thing even more annoying.

I found myself enjoying this audiobook quite a bit. The narrator really brought the story to life and made it that much more gripping.

William Pauley III is one of most interesting writers I've ever discovered and I've fallen in love with everything he's done. Connor Brannigan is the perfect narrator. His voice suits Pauley's writing so well.

I can honestly say I've never read anything quite like this, except maybe The Tower, by the same author. William Pauley III has a very uniquely unsettling yet addictive writing style. Their writing paired with the audio narration by Connor Brannigan is hypnotic and all encompassing. Once you hit play these stories grab ahold of you and just do not let go. I will be haunted by this story for years.

That being said, I didn't enjoy this read so much as I did the first visit into the bizarre world that is the eighth block. This story was wild and unhinged and creepy and gross and left me craving cheese.

I look forward to book 3!

Holy Hell! What an insane story about true insanity. The Bedlam Bible stories have become my guilty pleasure. Weirdly over sexual. Charmingly disturbed. It’s weird fiction meets hilarious horror. I LOVE IT!

I was keen to return to 8th block and kind of looking forward to how the story was going to develop after reading the first Bedlam Bible book, which centered around a bunch of weird happenings in a radioactive semi-sentient building full of unreliable narrators, in sort of like a "slice of life" style book.

This book I did as a netgally audiobook and I will say the narrator, Connor Brannigan did an excellent job with this one as he did with the last. He has a good grasp with the absurdity of the material and moves through it with good inflection and expression, which helps make the whole experience of the story feel more close and realistic. These books end up feeling like someone is unfolding a comic book in your mind.

Into the sunflower nut meat of the thing though, this particular story didn't vibe with me. The weird and interconnected vignette quality of the last book was scrapped for a singular story this time, which in itself isn't bag, but it meant that I felt this story itself ran a bit long in the middle, long after the point about the characters had been made. Another perspective in the 8th block, like we got in The Tower would have made this really click, imo. The stuff that didn't work for me is that I don't find anything especially bizarro about the trauma responses and ongoing mental health crisis of a deeply abused woman. That doesn't hinge on a creepy super/sub natural tenement building--like I have met her, in a university classroom, in a bar bathroom. To a certain extent at times I have been her. So I spent the entire book feeling really sad for Lynda. Like the entire time. Instead of feeling how I was supposed to feel about it I think, which made me kind of wonder of I was meant to be the audience of this book, or any of these books. Which is always a bummer. It was very well written for whoever it is meant for however, so if that is you, I am sure you will like this a lot.

Add to that how damaged she was seemed to serve as a foil for regularly giving us opportunities to be explicitly told how good a guy the protagonist was even though on the whole he didn't seem to be doing good guy things. And that those things were then written off or tossed away with explanations that even the best of guys are absolutely powerless when faced with their biological urges or when asked to take their dick out. As though no man ever when asked this question in the history of time by a cute girl has been physically capable of saying "no thank you." Which, feels like a bit of a convenient excuse for our main character to not have to actually confront the fact that this situation seems to favour his sexual desire while knowing the entire time it does not suit his or her emotional, or social desires, and that consent has been murky between them both the entire time. I can't say whether this was an intentional choice of the author and that we were supposed to grapple with this, but it did sort of feel too me like we were supposed to read her as "crazy" and him as "nice guy" but I was having a very hard time keeping either of those concepts so simple.

Leaving it on a high note though, the ending was *awesome*. It was great. I wish more of the book had been about that or like that or them dealing with or grappling with it. I felt robbed of all that great twisty weirdness that it only really shined out at the very end of the book and I was hoping for that to be the main thread through the whole thing. I liked the Bedlam Bible for the off-beat bizzaro sick-sad-world type stuff and I really wanted there to be more of that and less real trauma of CSA victims and how it presents in adults, and like, mental health reactions and self destruction in all it's forms that people who feel unworthy of care tend to fall into.

I'll probably give the 3rd book a listen and see what direction the series is going. If it heads back towards book one I will probably stick with it. If it keeps on writing women this way and leaning into graphic adult content like this book, I'll probably end my visits too 8th block at book 3.

Thanks to Doom Publishing for the netgally audiobook of this title.