Book: Fluids

Author: May Leitz

Type of Book: Fiction, novel, horror, extreme horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Extreme horror is odd by default, and the odd was strong in this book. This book also demonstrated to me that I really need to organize my book shopping habits.

Availability: Self-published by BookBaby in 2022, you can get hard and digital copies on Amazon.

Comments: I saw the movie We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (and will be discussing it this month), which I liked quite a bit. I did my usual rabbit hole routine of researching the film, the director, the guy who performed the music and the cast. I found out that a YouTuber called NyxFears had a small role in the film and as I looked into her career, saw she had written this book, which I ordered (probably off Bandcamp, but I may be wrong). Then the book got placed in my to-be-read pile that by now has hundreds of books waiting for me to get my ass in gear.

A year passed and a casual stroll on the Goodreads tag for “extreme horror” showed me a book called Fluids by May Leitz. I went on Amazon, got the ebook, and read it. I was not blogging regularly at the time, but I figured at some point I would discuss it here. As I was looking through my to-be-read pile, I found the hard copy for Fluids and had one of those moments wherein I understood I had yet again purchased the same book twice but it took me reading the first three pages to jog my memory. I wish I could say this was the first time I have done this. Hell, I wish I could say that this was only the twentieth time I’ve done this.

All of the above is by way of saying that I have an extra copy of this book that is pristine despite me having read the first few pages and the first person who guesses who was president of the United States when I was born will win it. Just leave me a comment on this entry with your guess. People who are related to me by blood or marriage or went to high school with me are excluded from guessing.

Back to the book.

I entered into reading this book knowing little more than that someone who appeared in a film I liked wrote it and that the cover said it was an extreme horror novel. It is indeed extreme, but stands out from the crowd for being so extremely well-written. Extreme horror as a genre produces chaotic text, but within the chaos, you seldom find the attention to characterization and psychological motivation that you see in this novel. For a self-published book, it is well-edited and the writing overall is very strong. It’s not for the faint of heart, however, so if discussions of violence upset you, consider giving this discussion a miss.

This is a story of a lonely and loosely hinged woman named Lauren who meets a transwoman named Dahlia through a dating app. Lauren becomes obsessed with Dahlia and pursues her, eventually convincing Dahlia to leave home with her, and the two of them set off on a voyage of absolutely psychotic violence. Leitz gives us access into both women’s minds, and that choice in narration is one of the reasons this book is so effective because even though, ultimately, Lauren is a dangerous person who does grave harm in the name of love, she is still a sympathetic character, as is Dahlia. I cared what happened to these two, and somehow hoped against all known logic that they would both walk out of this story, scarred but wiser, able to live a life that made sense to them. It’s hard to make someone as erratically violent as Lauren sympathetic but Leitz pulls it off.

Dahlia is eager to change her body to reflect the image of herself that she sees in her mind and Lauren has become so nihilistic regarding life that her own body has no value to her. She was like this before she met Dahlia, shown when the novel begins with Lauren swiping her way through a dating app.

And now I’m zoning and saying no to everyone, as if what’s between my legs is such a prized property. It’s not. If my body had any value, I wouldn’t be treating it like this.

What is between Lauren’s legs may have no value to her but Dahlia definitely does not share this sentiment regarding her own body, and I wonder if that fueled Lauren’s obsession with her. In many ways Lauren treated Dahlia like a life raft in a sea of madness, and I think part of her clinginess was because she was intrigued by someone whose desire for femaleness showed value in the female form.

Lauren is the aggressive moving force in this novel but as I mention above we get to see her clearly and we know why she hates herself and why she is drawn to someone who values herself.

I tried to kill myself when I was seventeen, like everyone else. My dad caught me with a knife and laughed at me. I guess he thought I couldn’t give myself all the essential cuts because I was a girl. Not realizing I’d been cutting myself for years: he just never saw my legs.

Lauren is literally thinking about her failed attempt to mutilate her own vagina when Dahlia sends her a message, telling her she seems cool. This positive feedback is an aphrodisiac to Lauren and she replies and their uneasy, doomed relationship begins. Dahlia suggests they go to video but chickens out because she is uneasy about her appearance but that just whets Lauren’s interest in her. Her father had died from Covid and the pandemic had left her in free fall, with Dahlia messaging her in time to provide her with a distraction before she hit the ground.

Dahlia reveals herself in snippets. She says she dislikes being photographed because she has body dysmorphia, and later reveals that she came out as a lesbian at the beginning of the pandemic. They develop an online friendship, talking about their favorite serial killers and they bond over their mutual edginess and interest in fringe culture. Lauren begins to push for Dahlia to at least speak to her on the phone. After talking to her briefly, she thinks:

Dahlia sounds like a sad person who secretly wants to be satisfied. She comes across as the kind of person who could have a happy disposition if she ever looked up from the floor. She’s just like me. We need to start looking at each other and not at the ground, and then we’ll make it.

Hoo boy, Lauren is placing a huge burden on Dahlia, who has become an instrument of salvation to the deeply broken woman. The phone call does not go well and Lauren is crushed. Dahlia reaches out again and finally sends a clear picture of herself. Lauren’s reaction is telling. Among other compliments, she thinks:

She’s everything I wish I was myself.

And Dahlia senses Lauren’s dysfunction, telling her in chat that “…you feel like a nuclear bomb. You feel like the kind of person that is really close to doing something really awful… Talking to you feels like dancing with Dahmer.” That is, initially, appealing to Dahlia and they decide to become girlfriends. Lauren ferrets out enough information about Dahlia that she finds out the town where she lives and realizes she lives only a couple of hours away by car. Dahlia eventually tells Lauren she is a pre-operative transwoman and is surprised that the information doesn’t bother Lauren. That very night Lauren drives to the town where Dahlia lives, fantasizing about what life will be like with Dahlia at her side, but she doesn’t know her exact address and has to wait around in town, interacting with locals.

Her fantasy about a possible life with Dahlia is strangely prescient:

We’ll lie in her bed, growing together. We’ll be like a massive amoeba that grows and grows, completing itself but dooming the world.

Except she fails to take into account what Dahlia would want. Dahlia is a cypher to Lauren, serving as a solution to any puzzle Lauren needs to decode. She thinks briefly about returning home but she feels she is on a rescue mission to save Dahlia, who is a transwoman in small town Oklahoma.

I have to save Dahlia.

I wish someone would have saved me.

She is in Oklahoma for hours before Dahlia texts her, telling her about a dream she had where she met Lauren on a bridge. Lauren reveals she is in Dahlia’s town and Dahlia reacts the way any sane person would react when their online paramour comes into town unannounced. Dahlia lives with her mother, who would react poorly to Lauren coming to the house, and agrees to run away with Lauren.

It is at this point that Leitz lets us into Dahlia’s brain and it’s a relief. Dahlia knows Lauren is bad news but she decides to go with her anyway.

Lauren is concerned for my safety. I know deep down that going with her will probably kill me. But I have a death wish. I have to get out of here. I didn’t want to do it with her, but the prospect of my life changing now and then dealing with it later is too tempting.

Does Dahlia really have a death wish or does she wish the part of her being that is not under her direct control yet – her body, her sex organs, her appearance – would die? She decides to “make a scene” when she leaves, setting her closet on fire and pictures herself as Sally from Texas Chainsaw Massacre as she runs down a dark road to Lauren’s car.

Lauren falls deeply in love with Dahlia when she finally sees her but Dahlia feels an almost physical revulsion for her. They get a motel room before they drive out of Oklahoma and Dahlia is having a hard time. Lauren interprets her anxiety as lust and does not seem to notice that Dahlia physically recoils from her sweaty body. She runs through some alarming thoughts.

I could turn over, grab Lauren’s neck, and force her out cold. I could smash her nose into her brain.  I don’t have anything I could stab her with. Then I remember my injectable estrogen. I could use a needle, She would never see it coming if I was quick.

I could penetrate her with a needle in the right place to make it quick. I could inject air into her veins, and she would die in minutes.

This right here is why this novel grabbed me around my own neck, so to speak. Leitz writes on several different levels. First, I had to ask myself if Dahlia was just reacting to the fact that Lauren was a smelly, phlegmy mess when she met her and the physical revulsion was fueling her reaction. Another question is if she feels like that is what Lauren really wants – death. She later muses that killing Lauren may be “giving her everything she ever wanted” so this theory has some merit.

Most interesting is the idea that Dahlia is symbolically using a combination of the masculine and the feminine, the sides of herself that are at war with each other, to consider killing her new girlfriend. Sounds insane but hear me out. She wants to “penetrate” Lauren in the “right place” using a syringe full of estrogen. Leitz does this in other passages, and it’s remarkable to see this coming from a writer who appears to be just starting her literary career.

There is another notable example of this sort of writing in the same scene. Dahlia muses that perhaps her mother died from the fire she set in her closet, and that Dahlia is rising from the ashes of her mother, taking on her role as a maternal figure. Later, Dahlia will pretend to be Lauren’s sister and Lauren will herself take on the mindset of an older woman she’s killed and sees Dahlia as her daughter. Dahlia, the transwoman, is trying out a number of feminine roles in this book.

Dahlia does try to kill Lauren that first night. But she does not try to stab her. She decides to try to kill her using a decidedly feminine and maternal means of murder – smothering with a pillow – but even when she tries to genuinely strangle Lauren, she fails. She sees that Lauren really does want to live and stops. This is not unexpected. Dahlia earlier admits that “murders always bother me. The screaming bothers me.” She like many of her generation grew up watching the worst mankind can do play out on the Internet but even as she admires Lauren’s edgy love of killers, ultimately killing is not a part of her nature. It’s just numbing entertainment on gore sites or serial killer documentaries on NetFlix.

The hell of it is, Lauren interpreted this act of violence as Dahlia initiating sex with her. When she frees herself from being choked, Dahlia expects Lauren to kill her:

Immediately, she screams and lunges at me, and I know she has no mercy in her.

Has there ever been a better example of two “lovers” who had absolutely no idea what the other is thinking or feeling? Lauren’s sexual nature is violent and thinks Dahlia’s is as well, but even if it is (it isn’t, not really), she knows Dahlia is a naif comparatively, newly female, unaccustomed to sexual relationships, and therefore unlikely to have such defined tastes.

“Dahlia,” she says. “How are you so perfect? Did you fall from the sky?”

I can’t believe what I am hearing. I don’t understand, Who could possibly understand? My fears of danger wash away into pure confusion. We spent the last hour trying to kill each other, and now she thinks this is a healthy thing.

Dahlia tells Lauren she does not enjoy sex with violence and, goddamn it, she should have run for her life at the end of the following sentence:

“I can teach you how to like it.”

The two end up in an Indian Casino and Lauren convinces Dahlia to help her seduce and then roll an old man looking for a good time with two pretty girls. He is so taken with the pair that he agrees to sleep with them in exchange for money and drugs, but Lauren and Dahlia are experiencing a folie à deux, with Lauren as the dominant and Dahlia the follower and things end very badly for him. Dahlia crosses over into the realm where Lauren wants to take her but doesn’t establish complete psychological residence there. What follows is an extraordinary scene of intense violence. For those who love extreme horror, the scene in the hotel with the older man is the first “price of admission” scene. Extreme horror often suffers from poorly-written gore but that is not an issue in this book.

After their death gauntlet with the older man, Lauren realizes that he lied about getting money out of an ATM to pay them for sex. She tries to get his PIN out of him via torture but he lies to her. She thinks Dahlia has died in the fray and is broken by the thought that Dahlia, whom she feels is the love of her life, is gone. Before she leaves, she has one last exchange with the man.

“Do you believe in God?” I ask.

He tries to nod with his last motions but fails and his head just quakes.

“Let’s see if he saves you,” I say and leave the room.

That reminded me so much of a lyric from Ethel Cain’s album about an errant preacher’s daughter who herself meets a terrible end. As she is preparing to die, she sings, “God loves you, but not enough to save you.” Ethel Cain is also a transwoman, as is May Leitz, and it definitely makes me wonder how many transfolk think about Divine abandonment. For what it is worth, God doesn’t save him and, worse, his perfidy regarding the pin number costs his wife her life, as well.

Dahlia was not dead, however, and right about here I feel like I need to stop before I spoil what happens next. Just know that violence continues, limbs are lost, body count increases, there is a bit of slapstick involved in the violence that works well with the text and characterization, the book caroms from one frantically violent scene to the next, and at the end only one woman is left standing.

Believe me when I say that this is fairly well-conceived gore. Ten years ago I would have been tempted to discuss this book in terms of whether or not the violence was possible, if human beings could endure certain forms of punishment, if no one would immediately call 911 if they saw a girl with a severed arm wandering about, if no one could hear the screams of the dying in a hotel. Pedant that I was (and probably still am but I’m working on it), I tried to assign reality to pieces that were essentially splatterpunk rather than enjoy the over-the-top violence for what it was. Realize that yes, of course the violence and reactions to it are unrealistic, and roll with it.

But this really is well-conceived gore. It’s an excellent look at the lives of the disenfranchised Gen-Z, whose struggles often seem absolutely foreign to older generations. Yeah, few end up as absolutely fucked and fucked up as Lauren and Dahlia, but we can see how this novel is a distillation of a generation raised on non-stop reality violence. A generation taught to value emotion and that their expressions are “valid” while knowing full-well their parents may reject them and society may mock and socially quarantine them if they step out of line. Every generation seems to think that the younger generations are lazy, spoiled, decadent. I don’t. I would not want to be a late-Millennial or Gen-Z even in exchange for the youth that would be afforded by a later birth date. I could not handle the pressure of continual visibility, unwavering and hide-bound identity politics, hook-up and ghost culture, and the sinking feeling that I belonged to a generation of women whose fallback financial plan is selling feet pics on Only Fans.

If I have any hard criticism about this book, it’s that Leitz needs to transition between characters in a more concrete way. Be it as obvious as their names at the beginning of a transition or just couple of asterisks between character shifts, it would have saved me a few instances of backing up when I realized I no longer knew which character was narrating. Overall Leitz’s ability to imbue even a scene that at first seems like mindless violence with several layers of potential meaning is talent beyond what I expected from a book I bought on a whim because the author appeared briefly in a movie I liked. If Leitz ever decides to attempt more mainstream literary genres, I can see her pulling it off with ease. I realize this is something extreme horror writers are often told in a patronizing tone of voice. It’s the horror equivalent of telling a fat girl she has such a pretty face, a way to express condescending criticism. But in this case it’s a true statement.

All in all, if extreme horror and body horror are your bag, you need to read this book. Highly recommended.