Special thanks to Tenebrous Press for the ARC copy they provided.
December 31, 2024 and we’re finishing up the year with a review of Casual from Koji A. Dae and Tenebrous Press. Honestly, I can’t think of a better way to close out my 2024 reviews than the same way I started it, with a book from 10p.
Tenebrous has a habit of giving us the weird, the grotesque, the unexpected, and the just plain macabre, Casual turns this habit on its head, one of those rare books that stands out of the weird fold to prove the rule. Reading Casual is not like reading horror at all, and that is utterly perfect.
Because Casual IS horror, but such a subtle horror you won’t feel it until it’s sneaking into your bones, twisting your mind like the desperate ticking of anxiety prickling your neck. Maybe, for me, the horror of Casual is how unhorrifying it is, how like everyday existence Valya’s struggles with depression and anxiety are.
You can’t scare me, book! Minus some of the specific trauma and hallucinations, I live that particular blend of horror everyday and tend to forget it is horror for most people. Funny how lifelong mental health matters can just slip into the background after awhile. What, not everyone panics every time they have to pick up the phone, or gasp, go somewhere they haven’t been before? It’s hard to imagine those tasks being ordinary and not panic inducing, and I slid right into Valya’s mind like a second skin, instantly immersed in Dae’s work and wondering when the horror would start.
The horror is in every line. Every quiet nuance of living with trauma and striving to make choices that are better for a new life. Because how do we choose what is best for a child that will become an adult when we are struggling to just live and breathe? The everyday can be quite the horror.
And quite the beautiful thing.
Casual is an intimate mix of the horrible and the beautiful, like life itself, and definitely stands out among Tenebrous books. Reading it in digital form on a Kindle made it all the more surreal, as most of the book deals with the intermixing of technology with day to day life and how we will have to learn and grow to accept and integrate that technological future into our lives, which can be so tied to the past. While Valya chased her fox through her own neural pathways in her game, distracting herself from the world and relieving her anxiety in what was an effective way, I did the same with a digital book that gave me the impression of reading a physical book. Surreal. Fulfilling. Like Casual itself.
If you’re looking for something that will grip you, terrorize you, but subtly, softly, slowly, to the point you don’t even know it’s happening, Casual is for you. It’ll still be wrapping its crystal filaments around your brain after the last page. Trust me.
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