Sick, but not as sick as I expected...

Octopus by Matt Shaw is my 38th book this year.
Described as his most extreme novel yet, and slated by a few of his readers who found this too disgusting to describe, I had high hopes for this book but, unfortunately, actually found this tamer than many of the previous novels I have read by Shaw.

Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was very well written, highly imaginative, and great fun to read, but I did think it wasn’t as bad as all the hype made it out to be.

It takes a fair while before we get to the truly horrible bit, which I’m not going to spoil, but even then I wasn’t really all that shocked.

Maybe I’ve just been a little desensitised by reading Matt Shaw’s other work, but for me this only rated as an average example of his work and though fun, was not as good as some of his others.

Shame, as I was kind of expecting a little bit more ‘extreme horror’ but I guess what he was going for here was quality over quantity as when the nastiness does come, I suppose it probably is a bit shocking for some.
Just not me.
But then maybe I’m just a sick bastard. (Did you see what I did there?)

All this makes it sound like I didn’t like it.

I did.

I just didn’t think it as extreme as some other readers have made out.

4 stars out of 5