'Fashion influencer by day and grave-robber by night, Poppy Stringer is on call when Eddie Michaels—a flamboyant, piano-slamming rockstar and queer icon—unexpectedly dies. All Poppy has to do is retrieve Eddie’s body from the medical examiner’s office, but what starts as a routine delivery quickly goes off course when Eddie wakes up. Poppy must fight for her life in a blood-soaked night of carnage and fabulous entertainment all across Palm Springs.'
Most people who've heard of Chuck Tingle will think of works such as Bigfoot Sommelier Butt Tasting, or Pounded in the Butt by My Handsome Sentient Library Card Who Seems Otherworldly but in Reality Is Just a Natural Part of the Priceless Resources Our Library System Provides. As such, I'm not really going to judge people too harshly when you mention you're reading a Tingle book and they just laugh about it. However, despite these more unusually titled books, Tingle has created some interesting queer focused horror novels that stand apart from his other work as something that a lot of people should be taking more seriously.
Fabulous Bodies is Tingle's latest piece, and centres on online influencer Poppy Stringer, a young single mother living in Palm Springs, who's trying to juggle curating a successfully curated social media presence alongside raising her young daughter, Marlo. But social media doesn't always pay the bills, especially when you're trying to make the world think you're living a life of wealth and success. So Poppy has a side hustle, stealing dead bodies. We're not talking about grave robbing, however, as Poppy uses her refrigerated truck, fake uniforms, and various disguises to nab recently deceased bodies from morgues to sell to shady folks who want them for organs, as test subjects, target practice, and other things best left not thought about.
Poppy has no problem with her bodysnatching though, these people are dead, and anything about them that's important is long gone now, so why not make some money off what's just an empty body? When Poppy receives a mysterious phone call asking her to steal a specific body, a request that comes with $50,000 as a pre-payment and the promise of a total pay out of $5,000,000, she's hard pressed to think of a good reason not to; even when she learns that it's the body of famed rockstar and her own personal idol Eddie Michaels, who was just killed in a freak accident. Picking up the body and heading out to deliver it to the client, things are smooth sailing until the most unexpected thing happens; Eddie wakes up. A literal living corpse, the undead Eddie makes a deal with Poppy for her to accompany him for the night, driving him around as he engages in a mission to get out of his deal with the devil. What could possibly go wrong?
Whilst I've not read any of the weird romance work from Tingle I've read some of their serious stuff, and one thing that I enjoy about Tingle's writing is his style is the ability to blend together very serious subjects, overt horror elements, and weird fun. Fabulous Bodies is no exception to this, and I'd probably describe the book more as a very dark comedy than anything else, with their weird 'buddy cop' style mismatched duo in the driving seat of the narrative. There are moments where you get caught up in Poppy's life, in her struggles to juggle everything she's trying to do with her life, then Tingle does something truly shocking and twisted and things go full horror for a few scenes, reminding you that whilst you're having fun there are terrible things that are happening in this book.
Thankfully, no matter how awful things become Eddie is there to bring things back to being fun, despite often being a source of the horror. The undead rockstar ends up being one of the most fun parts of the book, and whilst I found myself never wanting to be stuck on an awful road trip with him like Poppy, I can't help but admit there are times it seems like it'd probably be quite fun.
As with any of Tingle's work there's a great deal of social commentary within the pages of Fabulous Bodies. The book deals with the struggles of being a single parent, or how difficult it can be to raise a child on your own whilst trying to pay for everything and keep the family afloat and still be fully there and present for your child. There's also the more overt focus on social media, and how much it's taken over people's lives and leads to fully fake lives that people live, specially curated moments designed to project this false image that no one can really live up to. There are moments when we see Poppy processing the news of the death of Eddie, but decides that her tears and ruined make-up will make for the perfect post, before crying for the camera all over again once she realises she can take more photos in front of the image of Eddie she has on one of her walls; or there's her posing with her drink at lunch, trying to look fabulous before she then has to go back to discussing her friends cancer treatment. These scenes are small moments, but are a great spotlight on just how twisted things have become when you're chasing likes and follows.
There's a lot of fun to be found in the pages of Fabulous Bodies, moments that you almost have to go back and read again because they feel so ridiculous, shocking, and twisted at times. Poppy and Eddie make for a wild duo, and their interactions are some of the best moments in the book. Whether you're a fan of Tingle's work, or just learning that he does more than ridiculous romance books, Fabulous Bodies is a great time.
Fabulous Bodies is available now from Titan Books.
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