This book sounded amazing! But unfortunately it fell short for me. I’m not sure if it was a combination of the formatting on the kindle plus the writing style, but it was pretty rough to get through and it didn’t make a lot of sense at times. I am going to give it another try on the actual print because I think it will make more sense with the real formatting that was meant to be!

As a fan of the author's eldritch dating satire Twitter account "dread singles," I was excited to dive into "Hot Singles in Your Area." The book follows Noah, who takes a mysterious job at a newspaper, and Malachia, wandering a bizarre, bone-filled city. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm quickly turned to frustration. The narrative is fragmented and often incomprehensible and experimental elements like footnotes and repetitive text feel gimmicky rather than meaningful. The book's attempts at weirdness and horror come across as forced, and I found myself struggling to finish what turned out to be a disappointingly unreadable novel, despite its promising premise and my initial excitement.

SO FUN and unique and weird and a bit scary - honesty would recommend to anyone who might like to read something unusual and brand new for the genre.

I’ll start with the positives for Hot Singles in Your Area, I liked the cover. I love reading spooky books in October and the eyeballs on the cover really drew me in. Sadly, I think that’s going to be the one positive thing I say in this review.

Noah starts a new job at Printed Matter, a shady newspaper with a hidden secret – but why can’t he remember his training videos? Why did he give some of his blood and what actually is his job? Elsewhere, acolyte Malachia is trying to work out where everyone who inhabited the City of Silence went.

Mercifully this book is short, which meant I could plow through it for a review without having to DNF it - had it been any longer though, I would have done. Having finished it, I can’t actually tell you much more about the book, the setting, the characters or the plot than the very rudimentary summary paragraph I have written above. I’m all for creating a fantasy world and the idea of a skeletal place with rituals needing bone dust sounds great, but part of that world building has to be shared with the reader. You can keep things close to your chest, or drip feed information to us, but when I’m 50% of the way through the book (or actually, at the end!) and I still have absolutely no idea what’s happening in Malachia’s timeline, then you have quite a serious issue with the writing.

Noah’s timeline is a little more straight forward – he starts a new job and it all gets a bit weird, I was hoping that Noah would be the conduit for the reader– his plot learning about the world that Malachia inhabits to give us a perspective from his eyes. However, his story is fragmented as he can’t seem to remember anything that happens to him, and in the end it isn’t linked to Malachia in any way at all.

I know that I’m reading an ARC copy, and we are often told that it isn’t the finished product and to give grace for typos etc. However, the purpose of an ARC is to give it to readers in order to generate hype and buzz around the book for publication day, so you’d expect a publisher would want to give the best possible version to be reviewed. The formatting in this book is so bad that it’s unreadable at times – some of that is the fault of the publisher and the ebook format that they haven’t edited for, and some of this is the writing structure. The footnotes are not hyperlinked, they are just randomly put into the book, sometimes pages away, sometimes interrupting mid-sentence. The footnotes themselves seem pointless, giving odd book references or referring to something I didn’t understand – I ended up skimming over them. The book has 2 sections that show the newspaper pages of Printed Matter. However, on the Kindle version, these are so badly formatted that you only get a small square of the image per page, so you can’t actually read them. The first one is 113 pages on my Kindle, and I just had to skip though it because I couldn’t read it. The ending also has a memo which could have explained the entire plot, as far as I know, but it was 50 pages and unreadable, so I’ll never know. There’s one point in the book where the word ‘Darkness’ is just repeated over and over again for several pages and then the next few chapters alternate between the plot and the repeating word darkness for half a page (on the smallest font size). This just felt very lazy to me and was unnecessary.

My last note is with the title - it’s an odd choice. It isn’t really relevant to the story, other than the job is with a newspaper and I think it might have been part of the 113 pages of newspaper images I couldn’t read. However, it means it’s a book you feel a little embarrassed to tell people you are reading, you can’t discuss it with your co-workers, you tell your friends and you have to follow it up with – ‘it’s a horror, there’s eyeballs on the cover!’. It also gets blocked by the Instagram algorithm when you try and hashtag it. Just seems like a very silly title when something more relevant could be used instead.

Overall, as you may have gathered, I was not impressed by Hot Singles In Your Area - there might be an ok story in there somewhere, but it needs a major re-write and better formatting. Thank you to Unbound and NetGalley for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for a (very) honest review.

Body Horror. Satire. You Win. The world created and the details that my head picture thanks to colorful writing really made this a fun ride!

LOVED this - the body horror was a lot but thankfully I like that in my horror when it’s done right and this absolutely was.

Spooky, scary, freaky, weird. I am usually not afraid of any of those in a book but this was almost too unhinged for me. I found it hard to follow at times but it was a really good time. If you like weird and are ok being confused, this is the book for you

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for sending me this ARC in return for my honest review!

I really wanted to like this one, but it felt like a novella that should accompany something else. It didn’t really have a beginning or ending, but a story that felt like an insert to something else.
The way the book reads is very difficult and the formatting was a poor choice in my opinion. I’m curious to see what the physical book of this would look like and if it would help anything.
I can’t even give you any spoilers because I truly don’t know what happened in this book.

This ended up being a DNF for me at 20%. I thought the plot sounded interesting, but I just couldn't get into it. There was nothing that felt like horror. A large portion of the book is also newspaper articles that were unable to be read in a digital format.

I couldn't finish it. 50% in and the two characters seemingly at the center of the story still haven't met. We have to slog thru the necromancy of a fantasy character as though we understand all of the references made about her practice....
There didn't seem to be much world building or character depth.
In short, I was bored.

Not my favorite. The story felt disjointed and a bit confusing. I don't think I could recommend to people.

The title and cover drew me to this book but I was quite surprised by its content. I found the writing style quite jarring due to the footnotes dotted through it. I actually loved the inclusion of newspaper clippings and enjoyed rooting my way through these. However the story felt disjointed and this was more frustrating than eerie for me.

Hot Singles in Your Area by Jordan Shiveley is a gripping and darkly humorous body-horror novel. The story follows two characters, Noah and Malachia, as they are thrust into strange and sinister circumstances controlled by a powerful media conglomerate. Noah's desperate search for a new job leads him into a bizarre corporate world, while Malachia navigates the eerie, empty streets of the City of Silence. Their narratives weave together in an unpredictable, chilling plot filled with unsettling imagery and biting satire on corporate life. Shiveley's storytelling blends horror with sharp social commentary, making this a twisted yet engaging read for fans of speculative fiction.
The book's unique premise and dark humor set it apart, offering readers an unsettling look at modern society through a lens of supernatural horror.

Thank you Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book. These opinions are completely my own

I got a What we do in the Shadows vibe from the book and I kinda love it. The ads are entertaining as is the addition of comical subtexts. I enjoyed reading.

I was drawn in by the cover and the description, however I found this book incredibly hard to follow. I want to like this book but I have really struggled to finish the book which is disappointing considering its length.

A fever dream. I’ve just stepped out of a fever dream.

This is my favourite kind of book. I love feeling 17 emotions at once and not knowing which one compels me most.

Jordan Shiveley has managed to create a completely unhinged and unrealistic world that was entirely relatable.

I’ll leave this review with one of my favourite lines “What the fuck had happened? He let out a long groan as images of… Had he deep throated a mouth-demon dick? Talk about your high-school fanfics that you never thought would get onto and off of your bucket list in the same day.”

Thank you Net Galley for the ARC, I can’t wait to add this to my collection.

This book was definitely not what I thought it was going to be. I enjoyed it. If I see it in stores when it’s released I’ll pick up a copy.

This was very difficult to read as nothing seems to make sense, very disjointed. Unfortunately very messy I did not enjoy reading this book.

I was drawn in by the bright and eye catching cover, as it looked interesting - a horror comedy! I was not disappointed, this book felt very much like a grown up Goosebumps book, bringing me back to my childhood hiding under the covers with a torch to find out what happened next. It was a fun, weird and wonderful tale over the 2 worlds colliding in disgusting and funny ways.
Perfect book for the spooky season coming up

This was a hard book to get through. The chapters with Noah were okay for the most part but I barely understood the ones with Malachia. The stories in the adverts were interesting but even they would cut off after the section was done and I kept feeling like I was in the dark about where the story was headed. As much as I appreciate originality I didn’t get this book at all.