I cannot clearly rate this book on a scale from 1-5 because I cannot figure out my criteria just yet. It was a good(?) book I think, but there were many parts that made me uncomfortable, confused, bored, confused again, and then just like. Huh. Ok.

For something advertised as a surreal queer horror book, I truly feel as though I only received the "surreal" part. There was nothing particularly "horror" about this, and to my surprise, nothing directly "queer" either. I am getting more and more tired of books and other media being so hyped up for gay representation only for it to be like this. The characters never seemed to like each other, and obviously a big part of the book is the weird emptiness and depression of everything, but I truly never had a moment where there was any chemistry, friendly or romantically, from anyone!

Maybe I don't read critically enough, but I don't understand what most of this was supposed to represent! But at the same time of being confused from how vague some of the metaphors and such are, there was also many things that were too on the nose for me. The name being paradise rot, and in the book the house starts to rot and several pages later Carrol says something along the lines of "this isn't paradise!". That took me right out of it. I liked a lot of the descriptor scenes, I liked Jo and Carrols interactions (sometimes??), but a lot of the surreal stuff was just unnecessary to the plot as it was! I had high hopes, and this book certainly made me sit and think for awhile after I read it, and maybe that was the authors intention. Maybe she wanted us to be weirded out, uncomfortable, and confused. I won't say I liked it per se, but it had a big impact on my day and made me think about it for a long time afterwards.

TLDR ??/5 stars, too much pee.