The Chrysalis - A Gooey And Delicious Story
“’It’s ours,’ he said again. Mine, he thought.”
The novel, The Chrysalis, starts off with a dedication that reads, “This novel is dedicated to comic books made before 1990 and scary movies on VHS and the smell of old paperback horror novels.” And that’s how you know you’re in good hands right away.
Written by Brendan Deneen and released in 2018, The Chrysalis is a goopy, frighteningly fun, horror novel.
What’s it all about:
Tom and Jenny are newlyweds living in a small bachelor suite in New York. Tom is a bartender and Jenny is a fitness instructor. Both drink too much and have little money but are pretty content in their honeymoon phase. But when they found out their apartment rent is getting jacked up like crazy, the two are forced to move into the cheaper suburbs of New Jersey. With some luck, they find a beautifully big, old house that is going for cheap as long as the buyers take it as is. As is – meaning the house is filled with junk and in the basement something horrifying lives on the wall, hidden by a refrigerator. Only Tom discovers this and instantly keeps it a secret. (What the couple don’t know; the original owner killed her husband violently in the kitchen. The stain still remains.)
The couple buy the house a move in. Jenny finds out she’s pregnant and Tom realizes he needs to get a more reliable job with a steadier income and so he gets a sales job. While Jenny stays home cleaning up the house, Tom spends more and more time in the basement.
As the months of Jenny’s pregnancy move forward, Tom starts to fade away from his usual self and after a house party where Tom is particularly violent, Jenny leaves.
Will the two survive this strange turn in their relationship? Will Tom be able to give up the thing in the basement?
book mood board, original images found HERE
“Black and dark-purple veins covered the object, and he realized that the slow, rhythmic breathing noise he’d heard earlier was coming from the chrysalis.”
Here’s what I loved:
I wanna jump right into the monster! It’s so fucking cool. We don’t know too much about its backstory but we understand that the previous owner of the house had gone on an archaeological dig in the desert and brought this tiny chrysalis back with her. It then drove her mad and she killed her husband. She left it hidden in the basement, attached to the wall, hidden behind an old refrigerator.
When Tom uncovers it, he touches it and gets an instant almost psychedelic high. As the chrysalis grows by Tom feeding it live animals, the high starts to wear off. The more he feeds it, the high returns. It also seems to grant him unnatural strength and charisma which helps Tom with his job. But as the Chrysalis sucks him dry, he becomes like a drug addict. Jenny describes him skeleton-like in the final act. But the Chrysalis is massive by the end of the story.
And in the final act, it births what it has been growing and holy fuck it’s awesome. “It resembled a giant insect, like a cockroach fused with a scorpion, with multiple sectioned limbs and a long, spiraled tail that ended in a vicious-looking point. It’s many eyes were still closed.” AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
I just love that throughout the whole story this monster is brewing in the basement, getting bigger and bigger. But we only really see it through how Tom is affected, until the very end when Jenny confronts it. I loved it!
I also love a slow descent into madness, and this book is delicious with it. Tom of course being the main character, the story mostly follows him falling. But Jenny, who is pregnant, is also showing signs of being affected even though she’d never seen it. In one important scene, one of her clients kisses her and she grabs him by the throat and throws him across the room. She’s eight months pregnant! And at nine months, when she goes to try and visit the original owner who is now in a psych ward, Jenny uses the strange charisma that she has gotten infected with to get herself through the door.
It’s also interesting that the baby is conceived when Tom is secretly high on the chrysalis. When Jenny visits the owner, she says something; “It’s…inside you?”. But that’s never mentioned again, leading us to believe that perhaps the baby that Jenny successfully births at the very end of the story has some DNA of the creature in it. Which is horrifying!
It was a really fun, easy read with great character development and a lot of awesome gooey, bizarre creature feature moments.
Highly recommend!
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