Oddbody by Rose Keating is a raw, unsettling, and brilliantly imaginative short story collection that dives deep into the strange, beautiful, and grotesque realities of the human body. Across ten sharply crafted tales, Keating blends body horror with emotional truth, creating stories that are as thought-provoking as they are discomforting. From a woman caring for a father who’s devouring himself from within, to a waitress giving birth to an egg mid-shift, each piece offers a startlingly original lens on womanhood, shame, and the ways our bodies carry our stories.

The prose is spare yet powerful, and while the detached tone can give the collection a feeling of sameness, it also enhances the impact of the bizarre events, making them all the more jarring. This isn’t always a comfortable read – in fact, it often isn’t – but it lingers in the mind long after you’ve put it down. Keating’s ability to fuse the visceral with the vulnerable makes this a bold and memorable debut.

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“‘Something awful must have happened to you’, you say. ‘Something awful happens to everyone’, the ghost says.”

Oh man, I think I need to sit with this one for a bit. I read Oddbody really slowly - one story a day for a few days, then I put it down for a few weeks, then picked it up again and raced to the end. And I still don't know how I feel about it!

Keating is a talented writer and her lush, gory prose makes for compelling reading, especially in the first few stories. The characters leading here are all young woman, struggling with strange wants or needs. Some of the stories work better with the theme than others, and are really affecting - Squirm, Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead, Pineapple and the title story all hit the mark for me. They were gross (my god, so gross) surreal and in some cases genuinely upsetting - especially Squirm, a story that has ruined asking "would you still love me if I was a worm?" for me.

However, it is a really uneven collection. Some stories felt weird for weird's sake, rather than to serve as any kind of commentary of make any kind of point. That's fine, I guess, but generally I like my stories to have a little more bite than that. And some of the pieces felt unfinished, their premises underbaked ending just as things were starting to get interesting. I was left frustrated by these stories, wanting more from the narrative that Keating had laid out so well.

Oddbody feels wildly indebted to collections like Julia Armfield's salt slow (one of my all time favourites) and the work of Eliza Clark, but doesn't have the strangeness of Armfield or the black humour of Clark right yet. The result is a collection that just misses the mark in terms of greatness, for me, but is still well worth a read for those of you with a strong stomach. I'll definitely read Keating's work again in the future and could see her writing a banging weird girl novel - fingers crossed!

I'm not usually a fan of short stories but each one in this book really packs a punch. At times veering into nightmarish the author twists familiar scenarios in ways that highlight the absurdities of the reality behind them.
Squirm and Oddbody were the standout stories for me.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Cannongate Books for providing a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I overall enjoyed this short story collection. My favourite story being Odd Boy followed by Squirm. Some stories were hit or miss but I liked the weird, horror Esque and sometimes disgusting themes of the stories. They all flow well after each other and the writing grabbed my attention. I’m not sure why I didn’t love these maybe I wanted a bit more chaos I’m unsure. I sometimes find it hard to connect with characters in short stories because they are so short so this may also be a me problem too. But I overall recommend to read if you like weird fiction. There’s 10 stories and the stories aren’t too long so shouldn’t take too long to read. This collection overall is a weird girl read to provoke some thoughts about the conscious and unconscious world which is Definitley worth it.

Irish writer Rose Keating’s debut collection blends “weird girl fiction” with generous helpings of “femgore.” Like Eliza Clark, Sayaka Murata, Camilla Grudova or Heather Parry, Keating constructs bizarre, often grotesque scenarios in order to lay bare the absurdities and taken-for-granted contradictions of women’s experiences. Keating’s particularly invested in exploring ideas around shame from “forbidden” desires to immense self-loathing. Some stories really resonated with me like the wonderfully wry title piece. It’s a variation on a conventional ghost story set in a society where ghosts visibly cohabit with the living, voicing their hosts’ anxieties and inner turmoil. In “Squirm” Laura looks after her dad who’s inexplicably become a giant worm, it’s a perverse but highly effective take on women thrust into carer roles: frequently isolated, torn between feelings of love, intense guilt, and festering resentment.

“Bela Lugosi isn’t dead” and “Notes on Performance” examine the exploitation of women in mainstream horror but from differing perspectives. “Bela Lugosi” echoes, intentionally or not, aspects of David Cronenberg’s iconic Videodrome. Keating combines kitchen-sink realism with the fantastical to comment on fandom. The ways in which female viewers are frequently positioned to identify with predatory male characters – that’s if they don’t want to see themselves solely as victims. The distinctly gory “Notes” deals with the prevalence of violence against women in horror cinema, communicated via the ordeals of a young actor cast in her first major role: dismembered prey in a slasher movie.

Some entries like “Mouthful,” which draws on concepts of the “monstrous feminine,” didn’t entirely convince, despite potentially intriguing parallels with Stephen King’s Thinner - it’s closer to an outline or sketch than fully-realised narrative. But there were also a number of standouts. “Pineapple” revolves around a woman’s unsettling rebellion against her dull, controlling boyfriend and their austere, sterile existence. Jen’s dissatisfaction leads her to Mary; a transgressive artist whose work features extreme forms of body modification. It’s carefully-crafted, inventive and deeply uncomfortable. However, I’m puzzled about Keating’s incorporation of animals here - Rachel Yoder seems a likely influence. But I’m uncertain whether Keating’s animals function purely as donor figures or whether they’re part of a wider cultural critique? Does the plethora of mutilated animals represent a condemnation of speciesism, vivisection or the fur industry? Or do they simply signify Jen’s longing to embrace her animality? Her need to overcome the self-disgust that threatens to overwhelm her, to wholly reject perceptions of her body as intrinsically sullied.

“Next to Cleanliness” also deals with issues around embodiment, specifically capitalism’s commodification of women and the hugely profitable wellness industry. Macabre and inventive, it follows Catherine whose friend suggests she’d benefit from a cleanse, and recommends sessions at a specialist clinic. Lured by the prospect of reinvention, Catherine follows her doctor’s regimen to the letter with catastrophic results. But are these the fault of the cleansing programme or something lacking in Catherine? Another highlight was the enigmatic, surreal, fable-like “Vegetable” with its arresting imagery, menacing men and strange, mutant creatures.

Consumed in quick succession, Keating’s depictions of fractured relationships, alienated girls and struggling women, can verge on repetitive. But she’s a more-than-promising writer; and there’s enough here that’s arresting and insightful to compensate for any shortcomings.

Rating: 3/3.5

What a collection.
Oddbody is a collection of ten short stories about oddities, existing, non-existing, and half-existing in our subconscious.
It is a wise choice to start with two strong stories titled Oddboy and Squirm.
I liked all of these stories to a large extent, some more than the others.
Rose Keating knows how to write engaging stories and the literary quality of them is very high.
I found this extremely enjoyable and fresh.

This is a strange collection of short stories that made me uncomfortable in many ways. Some of the stories will play on my mind for a while after reading.

If you told me there was a body-horror themed weird girl fiction short story collection that I wouldn’t enjoy I wouldn’t have believed you, but Keating has managed to make that a reality. I’m not one to shy away from body-horror but in most of the stories Keating slips into the territory of vulgar and occasionally perverse, trying to be shocking just for the sake of it. The stories themselves also often lack any real narrative structure, they feel confusing and frequently end very abruptly, and whilst she uses a lot of descriptive language I can’t actually picture the horrors she’s trying to portray.

‘Next To Cleanliness’ was a pleasant surprise within the collection, it was a clever critique of modern wellness culture and proves that Keating can construct a cohesive narrative- I just wish more of the stories were as well done as this one. I think the collection has potential (things just need fleshing out more) but the mark has been missed in the majority of the stories and I’d say fans of weird girl fiction can give this one a miss.

Thank you to Canongate Books and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

I was really excited going into this as I love short stories and books that are weird. I enjoyed the majority of the stories and liked how the reader could never guess how they were going to end however there were a couple that I found were hard to read and ended up skipping one completely. My favourite short stories were 'Pineapple' and 'Next To Cleanliness', I didn't want them to end and I wish they were longer! Overall i did enjoy this book and would recommend it to anyone who likes weird things in books.

✨REVIEW: 4/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨

🪱Oddbody: Stories by Rose Keating🪱

🍳synopsis: striking, visceral, and brutally honest, Rose Keating’s Oddbody is a captivating short story collection that delves into the weirdness of bodies and of existence itself through the voices of social outsiders and outcasts.

🍳my opinion: this book is a collection of short stories that are really strange, sad, disgusting and bizarre.... The truth is that as I turned the pages, the concepts became more... difficult to read 😂😂 BUT I love strange things and I loved this book!!! In the following slides I leave you my top three favorite stories 👀

🪡Highly recommended if you🪡

- Like weird stories.
- Enjoy being disgusted.
- Like the unexpected.

I would like to thank @netgalley and @rose_keating_ for the advanced e-copy 💌

Oddbody exists firmly within the new tradition of the 'femgore' genre. The short stories in the collection often revolve around a specific instance of body horror. In that way, the stories feel like particularly embodied thought experiments - narratives that push the why and the how of the body. They also look out our relationships with others through our bodies. The stories feature tangled, complex relationships between fathers and daughters, between spouses, siblings, between artist and subject, doctor and patient. These connections highlight the ways in which we interact with - and often demand something from - the bodies of other people in our lives.

Moving from heart-warming, to gross, to sad, to tongue-in-cheek funny, these stories manage to crystallise a great amount about what it means to be human today. The prose is measured but propulsive, the stories thoughtful but lack pretension. A stand-out in the recent surge of shot-story collections in this vein - one I'll absolutely be thinking about (and recommending) for quite some time.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC of this squirmy little collection! I did enjoy it, but I think some of the metaphors were too on the nose, like it was very clear at the end of each story what the ~moral~ was. Some worked, some not so much. We had personal ghosts, worm dads, brutal body modifications, final girls, and literal egg-laying women. The concepts were cool but some of them were definitely not fleshed out enough for my tastes. They could have been explored more and it would have been a much more impactful collection.
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My favourites were Squirm (a woman looks after her dad following a bizarre transformation), Pineapple (a woman balances a new relationship and unique body modifications as art), and Eggshells (women lay eggs each morning whose contents can be manipulated via thoughts).
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Promising as a debut, I just wanted a little more substance!

Oddbody is one of the weirdest books I’ve read lately, and I really enjoyed it.

This short story collection explores the strangeness of being in a body, especially as a woman, and mixes everyday feelings (shame, desire, loneliness) with surreal or disturbing events. A woman lays eggs during her breakfast shift, someone has wings surgically attached, and there’s even a ghost ex. Yes, it’s that kind of book… and somehow, it all works.

The stories are short, sharp, and deeply atmospheric. They reminded me of Raw or Titane, or even some Cronenberg films: grotesque but also emotional. I’m not sure I caught all the deeper meanings, but I was totally immersed in the writing and tone.

My favorites were “Eggshells” and “Bela Lugosi is Not Dead”; both stayed with me long after finishing. If you like strange, feminist, body-focused fiction that makes you feel things (and squirm a little), this is a great pick.

In these ten remarkable stories Keating brings us a vivid, allegorical, examination of womanhood, sex, shame, and the everyday needs of our minds and bodies.

These stories are – as one of her own characters puts it – “terrifying and glorious”; exhilarating, rich and beautifully written, animating their otherness with wit, tenderness, and a gift for stopping hearts within a beat: “None of them had faces, but they all had smiles.”

We find ourselves in worlds much like our own, but twisted until they kink, bulging the symbioses of day to day living into new dimensions. Spectres of mental health and dependency are manifest physically, seductive and capricious, and detox clinics hum with a vaguely malevolent magic.

In some cases, Keating pushes ideas along a continuum until they arrive at a new extremity – the apotheoses of body-modification, and the “murdered girl” as plot device– in others she unscrews our reality and reassembles it, disordered, with a wicked relish.

The stories are fearless, and crackle with lurid energy. While they explore some very private, intimate, and tendentious subjects, I’d hesitate to call them dark – they are too vibrant, moving, and sensual - in its fullest meaning - to feel truly macabre.

Jubilance infests the writing, no matter how disquieting the tale, and Keating’s joy in the transgressions of her characters shines through. As they lay eggs, negotiate ghostly relationship addictions, get purged of skin during a “detox” or have it fitted with a zip for ad-hoc removal, this book is ultimately a celebration of these women’s liberty to choose for themselves, regardless of circumstance or consequence.

A fabulous, intoxicating read which lingers, and one I will come back to.

I’ll be looking for a signed copy for my wife, I can’t wait get her thoughts.

NB: This book may not be suitable for everyone’s sensibilities, it _goes _ there.

This is a strange one for me because, although I was hooked and wanted to keep reading, none of the stories really sunk their teeth in. Definitely left me wanting more!

Wtf!! What did I just read?! Weird girl horror, body horror, metaphors for mental health, this collection really had everything. Some stories were just okay, whereas others were deeply shocking and hard to read. Graphic and visceral, I don’t really know how else to describe this.

(That story about the worm will haunt me forever).

Firstly I want to say that this cover is stunning, so eye catching and really made me want to read the book. This is a collection of bizarrely odd, disturbing and unsettling short stories, so of course I loved them. I couldn't put it down and read it in one sitting.

A disgustingly glorious selection of short stories! Perfect for fans of Samanta Schweblin, Agustina Bazterrica, Eliza Clark and Iain Reid. Dark and deeply unsettling, I just know that these stories will stay with me for a long time, especially 'The Vegetable', 'Pineapple', and 'Eggshells'. Keating is one to watch!

Odd and unsettling collection of short stories.
I think the writing is very good but the stories themselves seem to end quite abruptly and never really explore the deeper meanings enough to make sense.
Most of it felt dark for the sake of being dark and unfortunately I can’t say that I enjoyed this book.

Thank you so much to Canongate for the ARC!

4.5

WOW!

First off I have to just say if you like Weird girl lit, this is for you!

This collection was one of my most anticipated reads and I was so happy to be able to get an arc and I was expecting to enjoy this BUT not the way that I ended up.

The first short story, I'm sorry but I just have to go on about how that was just absolute perfection for me. I sobbed. I full on began to sob while reading it. It hit close to home, may not to some but as a reader and reading something that felt so SO close and personal was so jarring and just raw that I was destroyed by it and loved every seconds loooool

each story holds it own horror to it. With it being literally something horrific happening like physically, emotionally, or mentally. We also see a lot of things that are pressed onto women in society.

Another story I loved was Notes on Performance - sooooo much I could go on about the dynamics of how women vs men are treated within that story. UGH YES!

Surreal to the max and just such a wonderful collection! wow!