From Chuck Tingle, USA Today bestselling author of Bury Your Gays, comes Fabulous Bodies, a supernatural joyride where Drive meets Beetlejuice.

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.

I received an advance copy of this book courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

I always know going into any Chuck Tingle book that I’m about to have a bloody, weird, wonderful time, and once again, this one absolutely delivered. It’s impossible for him to write a boring book, and he never wastes a page. He gets in, throws you into chaos, and wraps the whole thing up before you have a chance to catch your breath.

This one focuses on Poppy Stringer, a fashion influencer with a daughter to support. The problem is, being internet famous doesn’t actually pay all her bills, so on the side–just for a little extra cash–Poppy. . . borrows bodies. Okay, fine, she’s a grave robber, but not in the old-school, shovel-in-a-graveyard way. She’s smoother than that. She talks her way into the medical examiner’s office, charms whoever is on duty, and quietly takes what she needs. It helps that she’s gorgeous and confident and a really great liar. The attendants don’t stand a chance.

Then she gets a job offer that’s too big to turn down. Someone is willing to pay her millions to lift one very specific body. It just so happens to belong to Eddie Michaels, a flashy rock star with a reputation for being unapologetically flamboyant. (Think Elton John or Freddy Mercury.) Eddie just died, and he’s a man Poppy happens to have been obsessed with for years. So this is a really morbid dream gig. It should be the cleanest, easiest body (and cash) grab of her career. But once she snags the body she realizes that there’s one tiny problem. Eddie isn’t actually dead. Turns out he made a deal with the devil a long time ago that lets him keep going forever, and that kind of deal comes with terms. Terms that require several sacrifices and Eddie needs Poppy to help him out whether she wants to be or not. The night becomes a bloody romp across Palm Springs, where no one is safe, and the body count climbs.

Poppy is so easy to root for. Sure she has a very questionable side gig, but I easily forgave her. This economy is no joke and people gotta eat! She’s quick, she’s funny, and she doesn’t break when the night completely falls apart. In fact, she fights back where most people (me–I am most people) would have broken down and given up. By the time things really go sideways, you’re locked in with her and you’re not going anywhere.

Eddie is exactly the unhinged, vain, untouchable rock star you want him to be. He’s flashy, theatrical, completely uninterested in anyone other than himself, and unhinged in a way that’s both terrifying and a little fabulous. The two of them as an unwilling team is the engine of this book, and watching them bounce off each other through a series of increasingly outrageous situations is half the fun. The other half is the kills, which are creative, brutal, and not for the squeamish.

The stakes are high, the violence is fast, and the pacing is nonstop from page one. That’s the thing I love most about Tingle as an author. He doesn’t pad the plot and he doesn’t pretend his story is something other than what it is. He gives you great characters and a clear, specific, slightly deranged ride from page one to the very end.

I did an immersive read with this one, and as always, Mara Wilson’s narration is spot on. She has narrated several of Tingle’s book and she always finds a way to make them her own. If you’re an audiobook fan, definitely snag this one.

If you’ve read Tingle before, you already know what you’re in for. If you haven’t, this is a great one to start with. It’s funny and gory and might just be my new favorite of his. It’s the kind of book you can knock out in a single sitting. It’s fabulous indeed.