I received this book for free from the Author in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Bestiary by Patrick Rutigliano Published by Torrid Waters on July 24 2026
Genres: Adult, Horror
Pages: 233
Format: eARC
Source: Author
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The nitty-gritty: An uneven story with top notch body horror, Bestiary gets an A+ for the horror elements, but a C- for execution.
Bestiary has some great ideas and plenty of gruesome body horror, and in that respect it worked well for me. Patrick Rutigliano is a solid writer (despite some awkward phrasing here and there), and his revenge story involving an angry woman and a mysterious carnival was a fun one. My lower rating mostly stems from confusion. The plot is all over the place and many of the action scenes don’t make sense. Despite its short page count, I struggled to keep reading at times.
Karen Lambert is eight when she witnesses something terrible. Her parents have left her home alone one night (wtf she’s eight!), and she decides to get out of bed and run into the woods. She comes upon an odd carnival tent full of people. She peeks inside and is shocked to see her parents standing up on a stage. The carnival ring leader is a man named Cromwell who claims to be able to cure people, and Karen assumes since her mother is gravely ill that her parents have come to Cromwell for help. But instead, Cromwell whispers in her mother’s ear and her body begins to change into something horrific. In shock, Karen runs back home and she never sees either of her parents again.
Fast forward eleven years. Karen has become a bitter, angry young woman, and all she wants is to find Cromwell and pay him back for what he did to her parents. She hires a man named Cal to help track down Cromwell’s elusive carnival so that she can take her revenge, but Cromwell has people protecting him, and it’s almost impossible to get close enough to confront him.
I’ll start with the elements that worked for me. First, I loved the idea of monstrous creatures emerging from a human body, and the author’s vivid descriptions were both fascinating and disgusting. If you aren’t into body horror, I would stay away from this book. And if you want a visual comparison, go watch the “Go Fish” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which has a similar idea. I thought Rutigliano did a great job of bringing these gruesome images to life.
The rest of the story is pretty violent as well. Both Karen and Cal bring guns to the party, and Karen especially turns out to be extremely blood thirsty and trigger happy. She isn’t letting anyone get in the way of her revenge, lol. The story is gritty and dark—there isn’t a drop of happiness or light at all—and that was fine with me.
The actual plot, however, isn’t as well thought out. The transitions between scenes were often confusing, and the plot becomes convoluted, especially in the last section. The story starts out with the idea that desperately sick people are coming to Doctor Cromwell to cure them–at a price, of course—but that idea fizzles out early on. Instead of being cured, these “volunteers” are turned into hideous creatures, and then what? At the end, we finally learn what really happened to Karen’s parents, and the reveal was disappointing and didn’t make sense at all. The biggest head scratcher for me, though, was why? What was Cromwell trying to achieve? I know the answer is in there somewhere, but it wasn’t clear enough to drive the plot, which was why I started to lose interest. In my opinion, the story needed more thought and development in order to bring it to the next level.
As for the characters, all of them felt like clichés of one type or another. Karen’s over-the-top rage seemed out of place, especially for a nineteen-year-old who lost her parents when she was eight (it would have made more sense if she’d been a teenager when her parents disappeared). Cal seems more like a thug than a PI—he smashes a guy in the nose in one confusing scene. Cromwell’s character actually worked the best for me. He’s suitably creepy but in a more subtle way. I did want more of the carnival setting, though. Most of the action takes place outside the tent, which is really only used in the beginning scenes.
Overall, I liked Bestiary but didn’t love it, although there are certainly plenty of memorable scenes for lovers of the genre.
With thanks to the author for providing a review copy.
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