Viscera

Gabby Squailia, writing as Gabriel Squailia, is an author and professional DJ from Rochester, New York. An alum of the Friends World Program, she studied storytelling and literature in India, Europe, and the Middle East before settling in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts with her partner and daughter. Squailia's first novel, Dead Boys, was published by Talos Press in 2015; Viscera followed in 2016.

Praise for Viscera: “EXCELLENT . . . unlike anything I’ve read recently. A novel of great imagination and even greater characters.” —Kirkus Reviews/The Book Smugglers, 9/10 “Are you looking for a fantasy novel with a vivid and bloody setting and a sly, haunting mood? Are you hungry for a book with righteously queer and trans characters dealing with trauma and loss, hope and resistance? Do you yearn to read about an adventuring party made up of two drug addicted fortune-worshipers, a pacifist immortal, a murderous puppet, and a witch with her zombie-bear butler? Then read this novel. It's amazing.” —Nerds of a Feather, 9/10 “Exquisitely imagined, deeply insightful yet scathingly witty, Viscera barrels along at a scorching pace after vividly realized characters whose separate quests—for identity, for revenge, for release—find themselves on a collision course in a world that's simultaneously both grimdark and surreal. Lusciously weird and utterly unique.”—Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Archivist Wasp“Viscera is a work of gleeful weirdness, set in a world that calls to mind China Miéville's Bas-Lag novels, and full of characters fighting to reshape themselves and their destinies, in search of deep and resonant truth.”—Kat Howard, author of Roses and Rot“In Squailia's world, trees can act as a living internet, the calcified organs of dead gods lie under a city and respond to spilled blood with earthquakes, and having your major organs removed is not necessarily fatal. Identity shifts and slides as characters attempt to shape themselves and are shaped by their swiftly changing circumstances. To what extent, Viscera asks, does who we are lie in our bodies, and to what extent does it lie in our actions?”—John Langan, author of The Fisherman“The world is seething with the grotesque and fantastic, and gender fluidity is explored to heartbreaking effect.”—Publishers Weekly“With prose that is both lovely and grisly, Squailia’s sophomore effort leads the reader through an ambitious and gritty fantasy world filled with cannibals, blood thirsty rulers, and animated dead. Fans of fantasy with finely textured worlds will enjoy this book, provided they have strong stomachs for gore and profanity.”—Booklist“It takes a brave and immensely talented writer to concoct a dystopian fantasy of earthquakes, killing fields, drug addiction, and routine eviscerations that is also profoundly humane and laugh-out-loud funny. It sounds impossible, I know, but Gabriel Squailia has done it. Viscera is ultimately a story of self discovery, of being who you know yourself to be down deep in your gut even when the world wants to tell you otherwise. There is extreme ignorance and savagery in Viscera's fictional universe, but there is kindness and healing too—just like the world we know.”—Camille DeAngelis, author of Bones & All“The most delicious kind of nightmare, Viscera is gorgeous, theatrical, and weird as hell. Squailia's voice, the world they weave with it, and the eminently human characters they build will linger long after reading.”—Phoebe North, author of StarglassPraise for Dead Boys:“If China Miéville, Neil Gaiman and Hunter S. Thompson had a ménage à trois, Dead Boys would be the lovechild. A cracking book.”—Jay Kristoff, author of Stormdancer“A macabre, madcap picaresque full of fast-talking corpses and philosophical skeletons. Squailia's super-charged prose swings from bone-crunching action to meditations on the meaning of life and the mysteries of death. It's an exuberant mashup.”—Brendan Mathews, author of The World of Tomorrow“Original, fresh, and fascinating . . . I have found the sleeper hit of 2016 and it is full of guts.” —Bogi Reads the World