I met this book in a weird place. I was up late, scrolling through Goodreads, half-watching my tea go cold. I had just finished something serious and literary and I needed a palate cleanser. Someone said Chuck Tingle writes horror that is also funny. I clicked. The premise hit me like a glittery brick. A fashion influencer by day, a corpse thief by night, and her dead rockstar idol comes back to life. I ordered the audiobook before I could talk myself out of it.
Here is the thing. I was not prepared for how much this book would make me think about my own relationship with ambition and the people I put on pedestals.
The Corpse Thief and Her Idol
Poppy Stringer is a twenty-seven-year-old mother who steals bodies from morgues. She does not do it for kicks. She does it because she wants to give her daughter a better life. She wants to quit her day job and become a full-time fashion influencer. The irony is so sharp you could cut yourself on it. She is chasing fame and security by handling death. When her idol, the flamboyant queer rockstar Eddie Michaels, dies unexpectedly, she is offered a huge payday to steal his corpse. Poppy thinks this is her golden ticket.
Then Eddie wakes up.
He is not grateful. He is not confused. He is furious, theatrical, and absolutely terrifying in his glittery stage clothes. He forces Poppy to drive him around Palm Springs for a night of violence, mayhem, and what he calls fabulous entertainment. The question that haunted me through every bloody scene was this: how far will we go for people we admire, even when they show us exactly who they are?
Eddie is the kind of villain you cannot look away from. He is cruel but charismatic. He is monstrous but somehow still magnetic. Poppy is trapped with him, not just physically but emotionally. He was her hero. She grew up on his music. That makes it harder for her to fight back. I recognized that paralysis. I have stayed too long in bad situations because I wanted to believe the person I admired was still in there somewhere. Tingle captures that sickening pull between fear and devotion perfectly.
The Blood and the Babysitting
The book is drenched in gore. There is a scene with a skateboard that I will never unsee, and not in a fun way. But the violence never felt gratuitous. It felt like the physical manifestation of what happens when you let your obsession with someone else consume you. Poppy becomes a puppet. Eddie pulls the strings. She loses control of her own body and her own choices. That was scarier to me than all the blood.
What the reviews do not tell you is how much this book has to say about motherhood. Poppy is not a perfect mother. She is so obsessed with providing for her daughter that she forgets to actually be present. She spends her nights stealing corpses instead of reading bedtime stories. Through Eddie, she is forced to confront how fragile life is and how quickly everything can disappear. The real horror is not the undead rockstar. It is the realization that she has been wasting her time chasing the wrong things.
The book has problems. Poppy sometimes feels more like a vehicle for the plot than a fully developed person. Her best friend Noah exists mostly to take care of her daughter offscreen, which felt like a missed opportunity. And the middle section drags a bit before the climax. But these flaws did not ruin the experience for me. They felt like the cost of doing business with a story this ambitious and unhinged.
The Trap of Always Being Hungry
People who love horror-comedy and are not squeamish will find something here. People who have ever idolized a celebrity only to feel disappointed. People who need a reminder that the people we put on pedestals are just people, often deeply flawed ones. If you are sensitive to graphic violence, body horror, or stories where a parent is neglectful, skip it. This book will make you uncomfortable. It is supposed to.
Mara Wilson narrates the audiobook and she is phenomenal. Her delivery of Eddie’s dialogue is chillingly calm. She makes the humor land without undercutting the horror. I honestly think the audiobook is the best way to experience this story.
One moment hit me harder than I expected. Poppy remembers a line from Eddie’s music about being a shark, the biggest and most dangerous fish in the ocean. She loved that idea. She wanted to be that kind of predator. But by the end of the night, she realizes that being a shark just means you are always hunting, always hungry, always alone. That is the trap of ambition. You never feel like you have enough.
This book will not give you easy answers about fame or success or parenthood. But it will make you feel slightly less alone if you have ever wondered if you are chasing the wrong dream. It made me put down my phone and look at my own life. That is more than I expected from a book about a dead rockstar on a murder spree.
Can you really love someone and still let them destroy you?
