girl flesh (book)

rating

starstarstar_halfstarstar

date

10 january 2026

genre

horror

author

may leitz

girl flesh describes itself as an extreme horror story about love. i suppose that this is an accurate one-sentence description of its mission statement and it mostly succeeds at being just that, despite being massively frustrating to me.

the novel follows angie, a successful writer (although when it's explained what she's writing it seems to be blogging about true crime, which makes it a bit hard for me to follow how she's financially successful with that. does anybody know of bloggers in 2025 being financially successful?) and caro, an equally successful musician, who meet under the worst possible circumstances: they've both been kidnapped and find themselves inside a dilapidated motel room in the middle of nowhere in northern texas. they successfully escape the room they're locked in and manage to escape the place by stealing a car when their kidnappers return to do whatever to them, despite getting injured in the process as the guys indiscriminately shoot at them during their escape. cue the most confused road trip i have ever witnessed. in their minds, every single person they come across has to somehow be in cahoots with the kidnappers slash serial killers after them and they keep getting proven correct. rural texas is an uncivilized hellhole where everybody is somehow evil and there's just endless highways in the middle of nowhere (which probably is partially correct but is played up to eleven here).

angie and caro are both in fairly nihilistic if not at least passively suicidal headspaces and the decisions they make during their escape reflect that state of mind. there's a paranoia about finding help here that initially makes sense if you squint hard enough (yes, sure, maybe local police in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere won't be kind to you) that ultimately turns into getting more lost, more injured and more desperate on purpose, as if these two don't actually want to find help, don't want to get back into civilization and instead just want to develop a fucked up kind of co-dependency while their bodies slowly give up on them. the infatuation between angie and caro is believable enough. they bond over being in a fucked up situation together, as well as both having lives in the spotlight as succesful women of their respective arts that they are not happy with at all. their trajectory through the plot does make sense given that background, but it's still very frustrating to follow as they keep making the worst possible choices for self-preservation and getting to safety.

the plot is frequently interrupted by introspective segments where angie talks about her upbringing, her life and her struggles. these are helpful to understand her viewpoint but get very repetitive and keep using odd and unwieldy prose. take a shot every time angie talks about her pain tolerance (will make you drunk) or everytime a sentence follows the structure "this is [noun]" (don't actually do that. hopital). the pacing suffers quite a bit from that, frequently going from extremely fast developments to grinding to a halt.

at several points while reading i thought to myself that a more condensed version of this would lent itself quite well if adapted as a film though. i do feel like some situations where it was hard for me to fully buy why the characters were making decisions they were making even though they frame of mind is well-established would have had me less questioning in the format of a film. i don't think i'm smart enough to fully articulate why that is though.

overall, it's a read i don't regret powering through even though it left me pretty dissatisfied. the challenge of understanding the motivations of angie and caro was still rewarding to me.