I loved this book at age 16 because it felt like it was clever and swung big sticks at big ideas while meeting me at eye level with its enthusiastic violence and technicolour gore. On revisit, that's all still true, but I wouldn't even bother to separate those two statements. The splatters are what's so clever about it. Any of McGuire's attempts to communicate the transient and instantly quashable nature of human existence through dialogue are not a millionth as effective as his rendering of bodies as a series of pus-filled bags, blood-leaking sacks, and gas-letting cavities. I still think the relatively unambiguously happy conclusion feels imported from another novel. Our villain is neither human nor a force of nature, more a manifestation of the base animal urge. He rapes, he murders, but why? Just cos! He can only act on instinct, and his instincts represent the foulest depravities the human soul can dream up. Surely, then, it would have been more satisfying to drop the extended coda and dwell in a world wherein Sumner has come to terms with his belief in the physical, the human form, the solid ground, while still having this effervescent entity of his opposite existing somewhere in the ether—just my two cents. I love it regardless, and however good I or anyone else thinks this is, it gets inside people in a way very few books do, and for that, it deserves some flowers.

"As soon as he pierces the cavity wall, a pint or more of foul and flocculent pus, turbid and pinkish grey, squirts unhindered out of the newly made breach, spattering across the table and coating Sumner's hands and forearms. The roaring stench of excrement and decay instantly fills the cabin...The discharge is fibrinous, bloody and thick as Cornish cream; it pulses out from the narrow opening like the last twitching apogee of a monstrous ejaculation."

And it keeps going. A veritable thesaurus of the muck and ooze that make up the human body (and mind). Mileage may vary.