As much as I wish I would like every book I read, and I'm sure every author wishes everyone would like their book, sometimes an author, at least a book, and a reader don't connect. That would be the case for me and Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker.
The earth is toxic. Air, soil, water. The years of pumping pollution have taken their toll. Humanity is still learning to deal with this new world. But traditional social behavior is even harder to shake. But the government can help with that.

Norah meets Aaron at a restaurant for a first date. We watch Norah go through her day and peek into her life and get a sense of what she's thinking along the way. Norah and Aaron get to know each other as they plan their lives together. Everything looks good until an unusual creature is delivered to them.

And I didn't care.

A sci-fi/fantasy novel with a strong emphasis on environmental conditions? Toss in some strange creatures? This should be right up my alley. And the first couple of chapters, establishing the world and the characters, were really wonderful. But as it went along I struggled to find a reason to keep going. I found it meandering and dull.

I don't mind heady, thought-provoking fiction. I prefer it. But I need a reason to get into it. Usually that's a character or characters that I can identify with or sympathize with. I didn't get that here. We follow Norah and I don't care much , and while I might find Aaron really interesting, we don't get to know him very well despite his being a major character in the book.

This is just not for me.

Looking for a good book? Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker is a slow, thoughtful dystopian fantasy with some rather dull characters.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

This is a very strange book, but strange in the sense of mind-bending speculative fiction about a dystopian future, executed with great skill and, most of all, respect for the reader’s intelligence. In an era when all too many novels spoon-feed information, practically hammering the reader’s attention, Caroline Hardaker builds her world, characters, and mysteries layer by intricate, subtle layer. She invites us into a world that is grim but recognizable, one in which pollution and habitat destruction have resulted in the loss of most animals city dwellers might see, including pets. Governmental institutions are slowly being replaced by private ones, notably Easton Grove, and the author doesn’t tell us upfront what it does. Norah, the viewpoint character, has signed up with Easton Grove and has been matched with Arthur, a notable novelist. She’s understandably nervous about their first date in a bizarre courtship by corporate decree, but all goes well, they set up housekeeping together, and soon a cardboard box arrives. Inside is a creature that sounds awfully like a cat. A pet! I thought. They’ve gone through this rigorous process and qualified to parent a pet!

Little did I know that the strangeness was just beginning. As Norah becomes increasingly obsessed with “Nut,” as she has named the creature, Arthur grapples with crippling writer’s block and their network of friends gradually disappears. Then Nut’s fur falls out, Easton Grove increases its surveillance, and Arthur sports a new tooth, wrenched from Nut’s jaw.

In places, Composite Creatures wanders over the border into horror, but I don’t think it belongs properly to that genre. It’s edgy, complex, layered dystopian science fiction, with the emphasis on the inner lives of the people caught up in the Kafka-esque world. It isn’t an easy read or a pleasant one, but is nonetheless rewarding. Norah and Arthur are so much like ordinary people, and we are all vulnerable to the intense seductions and pressures they succumb to.

Creepy, atmospheric, and a fantastic read. I'm a big fan of the writing style, too. 100% recommended.

Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker is the kind of book, and reading experience, I find very difficult to talk about. I know that, theoretically, I am capable of actual criticism of the book — like, maybe it’s not great how Hardaker keeps the reveal for the last pages, and then the coda is kind of a retroactive infodump — but then none of that actually matters. This book set me wailing around the house, absolutely distraught for no reason I could identify with precision. It’s like my interior state became too large, too full with the proceedings, and I end up this inchoate mess who has lost language.

I’ve had this experience a handful of other times, where I have this paralyzed, almost jealous feeling about a novel. Notably, they all tend to be debut or early novels by women in often claustrophobic environments: The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke, Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng, Severance by Ling Ma, even God’s War by Kameron Hurley, even though that’s a bit of an outlier in terms of tone. They’re all a little messy, but have the viscera of an artist’s early work.

I’ve always been a fan of the Gothic, which can sometimes be almost cartoonishly large, in both literal and emotional spaces. Degenerate, aristocratic families rot in their crumbling manses, dead wives haunt the folly in diaphanous dresses, and hulking, Byronic figures silhouette themselves on the mountaintop, in the sheeting rain. The trappings of the hardcore, Victorian Gothic are so outsized they verge on comedy, if not deliberately, then in that blinking naiveté which is hard to discern from actual irony. Sometimes the satire can’t be told apart from its object, and Gothics often play with that ambiguity. I’ve been reading the Gormenghast books, for example, and that has both the gravidity and comedy of Gothic fiction in spades.

But Gothic that goes small — that details a cozy bungalow in some suburb, and the inconsequential denizens therein — absolutely catches me where I live. I’m completely susceptible to narratives of women locked in domestic environments which have been rendered inexorably, permanently strange. My outsized reactions might seem easy to psychoanalyze — look at mom, mommishly momming — though I think my affinities are probably at least as messy as the works that provoke them.

We meet Norah on a first date with Art, and everything about it feels jumbled and and wrong-footed. Their relationship with each other has been mediated by an ominous medical corporation called Easton Grove for inscrutble reasons. Though their first date feels no better than average, they are overly congratulatory of how well they got on, and seemingly rush into a cohabitation and marriage. Their first holiday party, to which Norah invites friends from her Life Before, is a master class in social anxiety and dangerous subterranean fault lines. The conversation always dances around some essential violation or transgression of Norah’s, one which must be worse than that Art is boring and American. Norah shies constantly from thinking of her previous lover, the one the friends knew, and this avoidance is a central lacuna, both in terms of narrative, and her personality.

Into this void, Easton Grove sends Nut, a mysterious creature who feels, at least in the beginning, like cross between a cat and an infant. They’re not supposed to name her, nor are they supposed to give her run of the house, but both things happen inexorably, even as these encroachments upend their lives. Art is a midlist writer of crime novels of some success, and Nut’s (and to a lesser extent, Norah’s) intrusion into his writing space disorders his ability to write. Norah more wholly embraces Nut, going against the edicts of Easton Grove, and her everyday companionship with the creature is shot through with anxiety and transgression. Norah often feels to me like Kat from The Mad Scientist’s Daughter: Both live with this inexplicable being in a cozy home in a dying world. Because the world is dying, quite literally, outside the windows of their small domestic spaces.

Norah’s relationship to art is all over this novel, and it would probably be easy to make some pat announcement about domesticity and its impact on creatively or whatnot. For one, her husband’s name is Art, and he is, indeed, an artist (though there’s a lowkey but constant denigration of his crime novels as unserious or lower order, both self-deprecatingly from him, and from others.) More importantly, Norah came into some money — the money that made it possible for her to enter into her relationship with Easton Grove, Nut, and Art him/itself — because of her artist mother. Her mother was locally influential painter, and after her death, her paintings acquired a posthumous cache, and sold for much more than they could have while she was living. Norah, by contrast, works some sort of corporate drone job, and even with Easton Grove’s meddling, is content largely to languish in the middle of the org chart. A large part of her emotional energies go to Nut, and though I think it could be possible to read this as the ways women are lanced of creative purpose by child minding — a sort of A Room of One’s Own where the room contains a fucking baby — but that’s too simple a reading.

I have two children — teenagers — on the cusp of becoming. I live in a comfortable house occasionally uncomfortably. Outside of our domesticity, the oceans literally burn. While I may (and do) struggle with my creativity — maybe some day I’ll finish that novel of Gothic spaces — I am absolutely paralyzed by how fucked up the world is, how terrifying it is to have brought people into this world, who then have to survive the coming cataclysm. Norah’s crisis is both creative and procreative, and I feel in my guts how they both consume and create one another. The old saw about both art and children is that they are a form of immortality. When the world dies around us, neither feels permanent, which is the whole point of immortality, n’est pas?

There feels like a line out from Composite Creatures to Wittgenstein’s Mistress in a weird and winding way. I know my appreciation of Markson’s po-mo novel is all ass-backwards — like, I couldn’t care less about whatever bullshit he’s going on about i/r/t philosophy, but I am gutted — gutted — by the overt plot of the novel. In Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a woman possibly named Kate is the only living animal left on earth. She writes Twitter-length missives on a typewriter in the basement of a house she’s occasionally inhabiting, about what she’s doing and Classic literature and only very rarely her past. It is a record that will be read by no one, not even the narrator, who eschews retrospection. Of course, it’s fiction, so it is read, and by thousands, but that’s not the point.

The point is a dead and dying world inhabited by a being self aware enough to worry about the future, and self-involved enough to cannibalize whatever is at hand to survive. Kate pulls down a house on a beach and burns it for warmth. Norah, well. Her response is what happens in Composite Creatures, isn’t it?

And you know what? I can’t even blame her, even if much of what she does is unforgivable. There but for the grace go I.

Actual rating 2.5/5 stars.

In this future version of our world all resources are as low as the air pollution is high. Easton Grove has come under political fire for creating an artificial bundle of happiness in a world where that emotion is in increasingly short supply. The thing you take and install into your home is the key to your own longevity, but the cost could be worth so much more than your life.

I was sad not to have loved this one more. It proved a great starting point for some deep conversations and was also an insightful, satirical read but it was merely just not the one I was anticipating. The horror tag led me to expect more terror to exude from these pages, when I found none there at all, and the dystopian world was painted in broad strokes, when I was hoping for more particulars about it be revealed.

Norah and Arthur are trying to learn to co-exist, to build their lives together. Following the path set for them from Easton Grove, they’re excited for their perfect bundle to arrive.

I don’t really know what to explain about Composite Creatures. This is one of those books that you can’t properly describe without spoiling the whole story, but also it’s one of those stories that when you do describe it, you kind of sound like you either didn’t actually read it or you had no idea what you read. Which, actually, is kind of possible, because this is kind of a confusing book to read, and I can imagine some people not knowing what they’ve read.

I was definitely one of those people. Up until the last quarter of the book, I really wasn’t sure what was happening or where the story was going. The writing was engaging enough that I really didn’t care if anything happened though, because Hardaker somehow manages to write even the mundane day to day life in a way that makes you care. She also writes just vague enough that you’re really not sure what is happening though. This is one of those stories that isn’t a thriller, but manages to have a palpable feeling of tension throughout, especially because it’s unclear what exactly you’re reading. You want to keep turning the pages to find out what’s happening, what is everything. You just need to see it through, even when it feels like it isn’t going anywhere.

This sounds really vague as well, but it’s just an impossible book to describe. I can see a lot of readers not enjoying this one, especially if they don’t enjoy a slow pace, or daily life as part of their stories, but I ended up finding this really good. I struggled at first with not knowing where it was going, but the writing made it worthwhile for me, and I was glad to get to the ending and find out what it was all about. If you’re a fan of slower stories that build up as you read, this has the perfect atmosphere for you. If you like a vague kind of dystopian setting, with hints of science fiction through, a soft sort of SciFi, I would definitely recommend giving this one a chance.

I still have a book hangover.

It has been a while since thinking about a book constantly and grabbed any chance I could to continue reading. A book that will be unforgettable both thanks to its writing and uneasiness it made me feel throughout this reading experience it offered me.

We follow a couple, Norah and Art from the moment they first meet at a restaurant until well into their life journey. Through a first person point of view we entered Norah' mind and feelings whilst unravelling the consequences of a disaster that has made the world poisonous and toxic; so much that animals are no longer and the soil, water, food is contaminated. Living with purifiers, and the short life spans due to the 'greying' life is no longer how it used to be when Norah' mom was alive. Here enters Eastern Grove, a company seemingly willing to help the situation by merging with the NHS in the promise of offering solutions to be able to continue walking on this Earth.

Caroline Hardaker's writing is unique; reflecting Norah's emotions so beautifully, I could feel all the sadness and loneliness she was overwhelmed with. Extremely well penned by an author who clearly has (or had) a pet cat and is a mother (or has taken care of children she has come close with). I felt every little thing, and though it was a tough read, I kept wanting to immerse myself into this odd world where some people sign off their bodies to a company, owning them whole; even their privacy, relationships, and life decisions.

Some quotes that stuck with me either due to the imagery or the emotions weaved among the chosen words of Hardaker's prose:

'We kept it light, and skimmed dialogue across the table like pebbles across the pond'.

'..he sensed that I was deep in some internal mood-swimming'.

'We split ourselves open and then stitched ourselves together, sharing everything in that parasitical way only students do.'

'Mum had always been the sun and I a body in her orbit, finding my way by her light, no matter how far I'd strayed'.

'It was a relief to let my body fall into that rushing stream without having to swim, or paddle, or fight'.

The book was a mix of dystopian, sci-fi and literary fiction. Melancholic, queasy that will create goosebumps down your spine; and yet you will be hungry for more. This book needs to be seen, read, devoured.

I am incredibly thankful to Netgalley, Angry Robots and Caroline Hardaker for the opportunity to read this novel in exchange for an honest review.

I struggled a little with this one. It has an absolutely fantastic premise, and it's one that is disturbingly believable and a little closer than I think any of us likes, and I enjoyed the writing style and it was a book that I ended up thinking about a lot more afterwards than I did during. However, this is a book that absolutely demands patience - for everything. While, I am more than happy to wait for some reveals, and enjoy the tension and trying to figure things out, it felt as though we had to wait for everything with Composite Creatures - from the plot, to the characters, to truly understanding the impact of the story. I will say that when it all comes together at the ending, it is more than worthwhile, but its the journey that was a bit of a let down for me.

Almost everything that we see daily would feel strange and alien to someone out of time. Show an Ancient Roman a modern carrot and they would ask why it was so large and orange. In Caroline Hardaker’s Composite Creatures the world has changed a lot. The sky is constantly covered with thick clouds and plants only grow with copious amounts of dangerous fertilisers. The days of owning a household pet are over. Therefore, try describing a cat to these near-future folk. It’s a strange hairy creature that stands on four paws. You can see what they look like in the history vids, so why does yours have a face that looks a little like your husbands?

Norah lives an everyday existence. She goes to work, comes home to make dinner and watches some television. Life in the future for most folk is pretty much the same as it is now, expect when it is not. Pollution has killed most life apart from humans and rather than becoming extinct we cling onto some semblance of life using science to cultivate food. Many people are catching the Greying and dying young, but the lucky few like Norah have become members of Easton Grove, the private healthcare provider who will keep you living decades longer than most. The price? A life partner who is compatible with your biology and a new pet that looks like a cat, but also something else.

Science Fiction is a fantastic genre as it can handle so many different types of tone from bombastic space operas, to the eerie, yet familiar. Composite falls into this second camp and in many ways, it is the story of a standard relationship that just happens to be taking place in an exceptional time. The book has a strange unerring feel to it reminiscent of The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone. Tonally this is the life of everyday people, and it is up to the reader to glean the strange world around them.

It is the poetic world building that is a highlight. Hardaker has a wonderful sense of place, and they paint this near future in asides and everyday actions. Norah and her chosen partner Arthur have a normal life, for the time, and it is only because we live in a world of blue skies and fields of crops that it seems odd to us. Even so, there are some oddities afoot with the mysterious Easton Grove and their health program. Why have they provided the pair with a creature that has to live in the attic?

As the book progresses and Norah’s world starts to unravel the earlier tempo and tone of the book comes to fruition with a vibrant and compelling final act. Hardaker uses the strange sense of place to lull the reader into a false sense of security. Hidden within the poetry and broken future are real instances of shocking Science Fiction and Horror. By the time the mystery begins to reveal itself, the reader should be fully immersed.
With its florid language and slightly out of step feel, Composite Creatures is not a book you can pick up as an easy read. To get the most from the book the reader should try and concentrate on the half- truths and hidden agendas that lie behind the central relationship. What is the mysterious Easton Grove and why have they provided Norah and Arthur with this small cat they are required to nurture? All will be explained in Hardaker’s own style that is not quite like anything else you are likely to have read.

I just... Didn't care about this book. DNF at about thirty percent. I can see what they're trying to do, with a kitty being some weird hybrid baby for a post apocalyptic society, but I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the writing, I just... Didn't like it.
It feels like it's trying to be an ARTY BOOK, and I got tired of a sense of false pretension.
Maybe you'll love it and think I'm mad, but this for me is a no.

I was intrigued by the description and was drawn into Norah's world. The world has become toxic, wildlife is all but extinct and plant life is struggling. The human race tries to stem off these affects by eating organically, keeping out of cities but this is not an option for everyone. Health care in the UK is more of a lottery but if you have the funds you could be part of an exclusive program designed to keep you in the best of health. Norah and Art are part of such a program base at Easton Grove - they meet there, are deemed genetically compatible, exchange portfolios and become a couple. As part of the program they share a creature which Norah calls Nut - you are never sure if this is a pet or part human as Nut is described as having fur but also hands. In fact the book has many tantalising reveals with gaps for the reader to make their own conclusions.
Ethics of creating something that is sentient to be used by the original donor is explored and we follow Norah as she increasingly isolates herself and develops her obsession with Nut the key to her and Arts longevity.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for access to thie ARC

My Rating: 7/10

Synopsis:
In a society where self-preservation is as much an art as a science, Norah and Arthur are learning how to co-exist in their new little world. Though they hardly know each other, everything seems to be going perfectly – from the home they’re building together to the ring on Norah’s finger.
But survival in this world is a tricky thing, the air is thicker every day and illness creeps fast through the body. And the earth is becoming increasingly hostile to live in. Fortunately, Easton Grove is here for that in the form of a perfect little bundle to take home and harvest. You can live for as long as you keep it – or her – close.

Review:
Composite Creatures is such a hard novel for me to rate, as it is one of the most peculiar books that I’ve ever read. I’m glad that I slept before I wrote this review and gave myself time to process it. I was pulled in right away with the melancholic prose. Caroline Hardaker is brilliant beyond words and this slow process of revelation melted my brain a little bit. It was a mental workout to unravel what was happening in this novel. That’s not a bad thing, as I like a read that challenges me.

The first half the novel was filled with description and a puzzling build of the state of Norah’s world. There’s a shortage of fresh air, animals have died off, the health system is crumbling and expensive when you can get treatment, diseases are running rampant, and life spans have shortened greatly. The second half of the novel was filled with more dialogue and advancement of the plot.

This novel was gut wrenching; watching Norah balance her natural maternal instinct vs what Easton Grove’s guidelines are when it comes to Nut was tough. I would have found myself in the same predicament. Composite Creatures will leave you with a sense of dysphoria long after you finish it. It’s a creepy and masterful observation of the potential destruction and tragedy caused by humans, furthered by privatized healthcare associations. I can’t go into the plot or into what Nut actually is without ruining the book experience for other people. Just know that this dystopian novel is a slow-building examination of Norah’s life in a society on the verge of collapse; it’s a call for fulfillment in a brutal world that doesn’t nurture, it manufactures. Softness is weakness in this life, everything is carefully calculated and nothing is provided without a cost.

Angry Robot always has the most unique books and this is no different. Composite Creatures will have people thinking about this read ages after they’ve read it. I have no doubt that this book will land itself in the hearts of many; its poignant, smart prose and chilling atmosphere will leave you disoriented long after you’ve finished. Thank you again to Angry Robot and Caroline Hardaker for the opportunity to read this and take part in the blog tour.

Composite Creatures has a fantastic concept at its core, and the slow reveal of information is engaging enough to to hold a readers interest if the characters themselves lack the charisma to drive a story. The dystopian setting is chillingly familiar, with cutting edge health initiatives available only to the "Haves", while the "Have-Nots" languish in poisoned air, eating poisoned food, and dying young. Norah and Arthur are two of the "Haves" who are building an idylic middle class life in the secretive Easton Grove institute, raising an ovum organi, and making a life together. Telling much more of the premise than that would spoil so much of the story telling, which is first rate.

While there's a lot of positives to be said about Composite Creatures, I'll start with what I did not like. Norah and Arthur are both dreadfully dull, and it makes the first half or so of the book tiresome. Norah is an anxiety junky who can't stop finding small things to worry about until she makes herself sick, despite the fact that the dying earth she lives on is full of real, large scale things to induce anxiety. Instead we read about how worried she is when Arthur hasn't texted her in over thirty minutes, or that one of her friends will mention her ex-boyfriend in front of her new fiancé. Or how the staff at Easton Grove will react to her and Arthur deciding to get married. The horribly insignificant things she agonizes over throughout the book made it a frustrating read. Arthur on the other hand is a dreadful bore with all the emotional reception of dull toothpick. It's plainly obvious that Norah is on the verge of a complete psychotic breakdown, and Arthur doesn't seem to notice in the slightest. By the time I was done with their painfully awkward relationship and nearly ready to put this book aside, the real plot started revealing itself, and the payoff was worth treading through these two and their very boring problems.

Easton Grove is an institute where residents live a normal life in an unnormal world. Most wildlife has gone extinct. Everyone who doesn't live in the Grove or a similar medical institute is dying of "The Greying," an environmentally induced ailment from living in a poisoned world. In the Grove, people raise their very own Ovum Organi. I can't tell you what an Ovum Organi is without spoiling a lot of the building that happens in Composite Creatures, I'll just offer this very small spoiler: it's not a kitten. As Norah tells her story you slowly learn more about how her and Arthur ended up at the grove, what's happening there, and how it's keeping people healthy, what the Ovum Organi is and why they are raising it. The world building is top notch, and the pace of story telling is masterful. There was more than enough intrigue to keep me invested in this book without a protagonist that I could identify with all.

While dismissing Norah's anxieties over little things, I found a sense of unease growing throughout reading the early chapters of this book. And as everything came together I was glad that I didn't abandon this one early. The beginning may read like a domestic thriller in which nothing thrilling happens, but by the end Composite Creatures has brought a fresh voice and new, terrifying ideas to the dystopian genre, which has been sorely in need of new adult entries for several years. This is a novel worth reading.

I would like to thank Angry Robot Books for inviting me to join this book tour. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker is a unique and peculiar dystopian novel. I am honestly still not sure what I felt about this novel. This is one of those books where patience is needed because you have to figure things out. However, the revelations at the end made it worth reading.

In this futuristic world, living on Earth was a challenge because it was slowly dying. Most of living creatures, especially animals, died because of environmental changes and pollution. The life expectancy was also shortened because of incurable diseases which killed lots of people. To preserved life, a health company named Easton Grove aimed to offer the best healthcare to ensure a long, happy life for a great amount of money. Joining the program wasn't easy: a series of physical and mental examinations were given before a person became a delegate. Norah was lucky enough to pass the tests. As a result, she was paired with a writer named Arthur. Together, they started a life as a couple, and everything was sailing smoothly until a very special creature was delivered to them.

Just like I said, I didn't fully grasp what was happening until the very end where everything just clicked into place. The story just started without any explanations or details about the situation. It felt liked a big puzzle that you need to piece together without seeing the picture as a whole. The novel was a great mystery where unanswered questions kept on piling up. Told through Norah's POV, understanding her childhood, relationships, emotions, as well as her actions and decisions was quite easy. There were times when the story felt slow for some scenes where just about Norah's routines. Lastly, the novel tackles some thought-provoking ideologies that I won't mention for it might spoil the fun of reading this.

The only issue that I had was how the explanations and revelations took too long. That was why I mentioned earlier that reading this novel required patience.

Overall, Composite Creatures has a strange yet intriguing premise. Readers who love to read something eccentric should give this novel a try.

3/5 stars!

full review and more can be found on my blog at https://onereadingnurse.com/2021/04/12/book-tour-review-composite-creatures-by-caroline-hardaker/

Thank you so much to Angry Robot Books (Caroline, Gemma, and Sam are good eggs!) for having me on the book tour for Composite Creatures, an exciting new book that releases on 04/13/21!  This is a low-key science fiction novel that is also a meditation on the future of healthcare ethics, growing up, growing older, and prioritizing what matters most

The Plot & Story: I honestly believe that the less you know going in about this book, the better.  Health in the UK is going drastically downhill in the future as the air itself causes cancer, the animals are all extinct, healthy life expectancy is pathetic… and the NHS is handing the reins over to a private company.   Enter an elitist group called Easton Grove, that promises health and happiness to those who can afford it, and pass all the tests.  

What exactly is this little bundle that Easton Grove offer?

Hardaker makes us wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait……and wait for it.  Most of the reveal happens towards the end of the book so I definitely recommend this one for the patient readers.  In the meantime we get a lovely meditation on life, losing one’s parents, falling out from our old friends, and co-existing with our chosen company.  This one takes a good hard look at life’s hardships.  The question becomes – is it worth holding out so long for the answers?  It took until the very last page but I think so.

The characters: I also think that the less you know about the characters, the better.   Norah and Arthur seem like a good pair, except it again takes a very long time for the book to reveal how they got together.  I liked Norah a lot and really, really hated Arthur until almost the end.  I think Hardaker did that on purpose though, she waited until page 400 out of 400 to make me forgive him, in that she also showed Norah as a “Composite Creature”

What does that even mean? Well – read it to find out

The World: Think of a slightly futuristic, overly polluted London with toxic soil, a sky with no birds, and a generally gray atmosphere.  The book creates gorgeous reminisces of the past through artwork and Norah’s memories of her mother.  I will give Hardaker endless Kudoes for the imagery in the book.  Hardaker is a published poet and I think that shows in her debut novel quite a bit.

Miscellaneous: One other cool thing I noticed is that RJ Barker (you know I always rave about The Bone Ships) blurbed the book, so that’s awesome.

The only thing that I really didn’t like was that Hardaker made us wait, for EVERYTHING.  She would mention a name, or a conflict, or a story, and give us absolutely no background until much later in the book.  Luke and Aubrey were good examples of this – I spent half of the book feeling like I missed something, but eventually I realized that we would eventually learn what’s going on.  I didn’t feel like these smaller reveals were necessarily worth waiting for though, which is where I docked the 1.5 stars.  I would have liked an occasional “bone” from the author.

Overall: Definitely recommend for fans of twisty, meditative books, mysteries, speculative fiction, sci-fi, and strong character builds.

This is one of the weirdest and most beautifully written books I've read and totally the type of book I can't get enough of.

It's somehow "quiet horror" without actually containing horror, but there's a constant sense of unease, wrongness, and anxiety like horror. In the beginning, Hardaker introduces the somewhat strange main character and puts the reader right into the bleak, futuristic world that is desperately losing the climate war. She lets the context explain many pieces of the world building in a seamless, intelligent way that I find so impressive. She wrote this in such a way that I never quite knew what was going on or what was going to happen or what the point was, but I mean that in a good way--like, that was the goal. It read like being the maze in the house of the wonderful book House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski.

The whole book takes place in the main character's head. She is strange and introverted while also being very average and simple. I was in awe by how Hardaker put to words certain anxieties I have felt, but it was also unnerving in that way that horror readers get addicted to.

I don't know how to explain or review this book properly. It's so weird. I also don't want to spoil it, because it unfolds so darkly and deliciously, crawling under your skin bit by bit. I suppose I would want to share with others that this book is definitely not for everyone, but likely for the reader who enjoys quiet horror, weird books, House of Leaves type of reads. Finishing it left me in that book hangover stupor, and I can't stop thinking about it.

Thank you NetGalley and Angry Robot for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!

Wow, talk about a round house to the head and a solid punch to the gut. Everything is dying in this book and the main character is clinging to one of the things that makes humans humans, compassion, and no one around her gets it. This story is like if David Cronenberg wrote and directed an episode of the Twilight Zone. There's not much action but as the story unfolds there's this rising sense of wrongness and I felt massively unsettled. I kinda had an idea if where things were going a little earlier than the final reveal but I don't think it was meant as a GOTCHA type thing, it was more like another deposit in the "oh shit this is creepy" account and then let's get on with things. I loved the writing and thought the author had a very unique and interesting way of describing things and putting things like feelings and sensations and other abstract concepts into words. I see she has written poetry before this and it definitely shows as the unique writing is one of the main reasons the narrator is so compelling and the story is so engrossing.

Another absolutely fantastic Angry Robot release and I want to thank them, Netgalley, and Caroline Hardaker for the opportunity to read this.

This is the story of Norah and Arthur. They live in a kind-of-dystopian world which is definitely similar to our own, but with a heavy emphasis on self-preservation. Illness spreads more easily in this world. Animals and insects are mostly extinct. People suffer from a condition known as the Greying, which I read as something like a cancer-like debilitating condition that ends in organ failure. It seems to happen to everyone in this world. There is a medical science company called Easton Grove that has engineered a creature which their clients can take home with them and raise more or less like a pet, which helps with the greying. This book is described as a dystopia in a few reviews I’ve seen it, but I don’t think that description fits for recommending it, exactly. While things are rather dire in the world itself, the focus of the book isn’t ever really on the world itself, with all its problems. Dystopian-adjacent, perhaps. I thought it was more eerie psychological horror, personally. The book was more about Norah and her various relationships throughout the book. With Art, with her friends, and with Nut.

The book opens with Norah and Arthur on a rather awkward date. It’s more akin to a job interview, honestly. Easton Grove has partnered them together and so they try their best to make it work by moving in together and taking on Nut, their… little bundle of joy. Nut is somewhat like a cat in mannerisms, but as the book progresses, you find out more and more about her.

This was a slow-moving and yet quite enthralling book. I found myself picking it up and not wanting to put it down. I have to admit that I had no idea what was really going on, but not in a floundering way, in more of the way that makes you want to read and read until you find out the little details. For instance, we don’t really find out too much about why Norah and Art are paired together, what Easton Grove is, and most especially what exactly Nut is for a lot of this novel. But, again, I didn’t find this to be annoying as much as it pushed my drive to keep on reading. It played out in my mind much like a mystery to be solved.

The prose was quite lovely, and it was very easy to sink into a comfy chair for an afternoon and just take in the story. It’s told in the first person from Norah’s point of view, which I liked. It was compelling being in Norah’s head for much of this story. Norah and Nut form a relationship unlike what is entirely expected of a person and their ovum organi, as it is called. Seeing how that relationship effects other aspects of her life was interesting and kept me reading well into the night.

All told, I liked Composite Creatures. I’ll admit that the ending fell a little flat to me, considering all that lead up to it, but I felt like it certainly wrapped up the plot and ended the book without leaving me with a thousand questions. I would definitely recommend it to someone who likes slow-paced books with lovely prose that present an eerie atmosphere. This was a fantastic debut, and I’m excited to see what is next from Caroline Hardaker!

Firstly, huge thank you to Angry Robot and NetGalley for a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Composite Creatures is set in the not too distant future: in a world where the air is thicker everyday and more and more people are falling victim to the greying. Norah and Arthur’s only hope for survival in such a world is through Easton Grove who will provide you with your own little bundle to keep and harvest when necessary...

I need to start off this review by saying that I completely loved this book, it tackles a subject that I’m fascinated by and I didn’t even realise it until I was at least three quarters of the way through. Due to the nature of the book, and the fact that there are so many moments where you will have a ‘penny drop’ realisation, I have to be quite careful with my rambling over this book as there’s so much I want to say about it and why I loved it, but most of those reasons are because of what I discovered for myself and the feeling of “wait… what?!” that I had at so many points throughout this novel.

It’s a personal favourite of mine when authors can effortlessly build mystery and the world around the characters without explicitly sitting the reader down, so to speak, and giving us a history lesson. This is something that Hardaker does masterfully, you always know just enough to understand the context of what is happening but not to see the wider picture. Whilst there were a couple of times I would have liked more information, it’s more down to personal preference rather than what it would have added to the story. I don’t think that it was missing these particular aspects, they would have just been a ‘nice to have’. Despite this, it is the mystery and intrigue around these characters and this society which keeps you utterly absorbed. It also felt like there was something symbolic over being kept in the dark, the way that both Norah and Art have to keep their friends, and society, in the dark over what they are doing with Easton Grove. This is further emphasised when you begin to wonder if Norah and Art even understand the full extent behind the mysteriously helpful company.

The entire novel is from Norah’s perspective which I really enjoyed, especially as she developed; from being positive and certain regarding her membership with Easton Grove to beginning to doubt and question it. I also liked the fact that it was Norah looking back too, as this added to the suspense: she makes references to wishing she knew certain things then as she does now, which just makes you wonder what happened to her to feel that way. At first I couldn’t see how Norah and Art fit together, the relationship felt very forced and unnatural; however, there were times where I could understand how they worked and after finishing the novel I can see how this is just another brilliantly subtle nod to how their lives aren’t what they initially seem.

Of course, I can’t talk about characters without discussing Nut, their furry friend that they need to keep secret and safe or risk losing their membership with Easton Grove, and potentially much more. I loved the way that Nut was described, you couldn’t quite work out what kind of creature she was exactly. The fluid image I had of her which changed depending on who was interacting with her and where made me even more curious as to how she fit into this harsh world. A world in which the birds have disappeared and in a desperate attempt to get funding, the NHS have joined with a faceless corporation to help care for people. Nut was such a delight and joy in the safe space of the house, which was an excellent contrast to the terrifying near future of the UK.

Overall, there is nothing else I can really say apart from you need to pick this book up when it is published on 13 April.

Caroline Hardaker constructs an intriguing universe in this book, and it's one that keeps the pages turning for the reader as the narrative unfolds. A worthwhile and enjoyable science fiction text.