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!

New favorite author, new favorite short story collection. There is no story under 3.5 stars in here, a total blast. Every single story is unique and captivating, you won’t put it down. For body horror and David Cronenberg fans. The stories should be read more than one time, on a second read you discover things you’ve missed, metaphors so subtle that escape you the first time around. I am very impressed and I can’t wait to read another Rose Keating story. Also, I’ll be the first in line for a novel written by her.
Oddbody – 4.5/5 so good, a metaphor for depression
Squirm – 4/5 going with the metaphors, here we have taking care of a disabled parent
Mouthful – 3.5/5 very weird, but I feel like what comes after the ending would be the interesting part
Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead – 5/5 absolutely adored this story
Pineapple – 4/5 we love body horror and David Cronenberg here
Next to Cleanliness – 5/5 “To put it simply, there is something wrong with you. I’m going to pull that wrongness now.”
Notes on Performance – 6/5 “Would you weep if you too were a thing made of absences, suddenly to find yourself whole again?” wow, this story was perfection
Eggshells – 5/5 what a trip
The Test – 4/5 it reminded me of Only ever yours by Louise O’Neill
The Vegetable – 4/5 what a concept
Thank you to NetGalley and Canongate Books for providing me with the ARC.

"It's my movie. I can change whatever I like..." - Bela Lugosi Isn't Dead

Rose Keating in this debut collection has included ten bold and unsettling short stories that confront themes of desire, fear and shame, each one asking how far the bounds of the human form can be pushed, stretched and subverted.

Featured here are provocative tales that take on themes about the female experience and turns them inside out portraying them as weird and surreal.

In one a woman finds herself navigating a co-dependent relationship with a ghost. In another a waitress gives birth to an egg during her breakfast shift, and a doctor puts his patient on a cleanse to ‘purify’ her mind, body and soul.

The author does not hold back with the imagery. These are stories that will appeal to fans of weird fiction and body horror.

An outstanding artistic romp into what the modern fairytale is. Each story in this collection is unique and delectable, strange, and surreal. Keating’s dark imagination is paired with a lighthearted and absurd humour that adds to the stories rather than diminishing belief of the story world. One of the most difficult parts of a collection of short stories is keeping the quality and themes of each at a high standard and not having peaks and troughs, and Keating’s collection all exist on the same outstanding and strange wavelength. This debut is the most exciting I’ve read, and the dissection of the body, the abject, and as Keating writes in ‘Mouthful,’ ‘I marvel at my capabilities as I don’t stop. At my capacity for fluidity, transformation, change,’ which summarises this brilliant and fresh new voice in literary fiction.

Rose Keating’s Oddbody is an inventive and deeply disquieting collection that delivers exactly what it promises - stories that stretch, prod, and dismember the human form and psyche in equal measure. These ten tales are steeped in body horror and brimming with discomfort, creating a reading experience that is as gripping as it is grotesque.

Keating’s writing is accessible and direct, which allows the surrealism and horror to take center stage without stylistic distraction. The collection hits its stride after a somewhat on-the-nose beginning; several early stories felt a bit too heavy-handed in their metaphors, which may discourage some readers from continuing. That would be a shame, as the latter half contains some truly remarkable and unsettling pieces.

Two standouts for me were "Pineapple" - a sharp portrayal of bodily autonomy and unease in intimacy, framed through extreme body modification - and "Squirm," which is, without exaggeration, one of the most disturbing stories I’ve ever read. It’s the kind of horror that latches onto something unspoken and festering in your own subconscious.

While some thematic repetition does creep in - desire, shame, mental unraveling - it doesn’t diminish the impact of each piece. There’s not a single story I would call forgettable or skippable, and that’s no small feat for a debut collection.

Oddbody isn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s an easy recommendation for fans of weird lit, body horror, and anyone craving horror that crawls under your skin and stays there. It’s unsettling, yes - but it’s also bold, clever, and painfully human.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Oddbody is a striking, offbeat debut that pulls you in with its stunning cover and keeps you slightly off-balance throughout. The stories are surreal, often fragmentary, and written with a dry wit that reminded me slightly of Blindboy Boatclub’s work—though Keating’s focus feels more inward than outward, more emotional than satirical.

There’s a lot of promise here. Some stories were a bit too top level, like they were deliberately keeping the reader at a distance, but others offered these sudden, disarming flashes of clarity. It didn’t all come together for me, but the originality is undeniable.