Book 21 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Now a little ahead with my reading schedule. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Chuck Tingle has become one of my favorite authors to read and I’ve celebrated each of his books on here as they’ve come out, so when a new book, Fabulous Bodies, was released this month of course I was going to snap it up and read it as soon as possible!

Poppy Stringer is a social media fashion influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers, which ostensibly is how she makes her living. In reality, though, she earns money to support herself and her daughter Marlo by being a modern day grave robber: bluffing her way into morgues to pick up corpses for various shady individuals to use for their own ends. She is not particularly troubled by her choice of income because they’re just bodies after death, objects that can be bought and sold.

Then Poppy receives an unusual call, offering her $5 million to steal the body of a recently deceased celebrity. Though she is suspicious, the job comes with a significant payment in advance, so she can’t resist the possibility of making a better life for her and Marlo.

At first, things go off without a hitch. As the caller promised, she has no issue claiming the body from the medical examiner’s office. But soon things take an unexpected turn into impossible horror and Poppy becomes entangled in a series of horrifically gruesome murders. She will have to use all of her wits and her ruthless drive to succeed in order to survive the night with her body and soul intact.

I have been deliberately vague about some plot details, even more than the book jacket description itself, because I went into this book without learning anything about it and had a blast being surprised by some of the big twists! I wanted to save as much of that as I could for anyone who might read my review before reading the book.

Fabulous Bodies is another fantastic fast-paced horror novel from Tingle, and I read it within a couple of days simply because I didn’t want to put it down once I started reading! Tingle has demonstrated a real knack for creating imaginative weird scenarios and for creating characters that stand out and I really root for.

Like all of Tingle’s novels, and quite frankly all good horror novels, there is a point and message behind the story. In this case, it’s not exactly subtle that Tingle is taking a critical look at the superficial nature of a lot of “influencer” culture, which in the story turns out not only to be a curse but, ironically, a blessing at a critical moment. There is a strong message of how the stuff that we can’t see in people matters more than the stuff that we can see and that they allow us to see.

Which isn’t to say that the novel is preachy or isn’t horror! There is a lot of mayhem in Fabulous Bodies and many people meet particularly grisly ends. This is a horror novel through and through, but it is a horror novel that has something to say.

As with Tingle’s previous works, I can highly recommend Fabulous Bodies, and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next!