Fabulous Bodies – Chuck Tingle

I've really enjoyed my last two Chuck Tingle novels, so "Fabulous Bodies" was a major letdown. From its opening chapter, something just felt off — almost like it was written by a different author.

Tingle usually excels at taking an absurd premise and grounding it in memorable characters and pointed social commentary. The premise here is ridiculous in exactly the right way: Poppy Stringer is a fashion influencer who secretly makes her living procuring freshly dead bodies for wealthy clients. 

When flamboyant queer rock icon Eddie Michaels dies and she's offered $5 million to retrieve his body, it seems like the perfect chance to leave that life behind. The catch is that Eddie isn't exactly dead — not a zombie or a vampire but a parasite looking for a host. So far, so good.

The biggest problem is Poppy herself. She's remarkably difficult to care about — selfish and surprisingly one-dimensional for someone who spends nearly the entire novel on the page. Tingle tries to give her depth through her queerness, a traumatic childhood and her young daughter, but I couldn't find much of anything redeeming in her. That became a real issue once the novel shifted into its supernatural road trip, because I simply didn't care whether she succeeded.

For much of the first half, the story also feels oddly underdeveloped. We're thrown into things, and I understand that part of the point is Poppy figuring Eddie out in real time. But that's also the basic structure of Tingle's previous novels, and neither of them felt nearly this scattershot.

The second half is considerably stronger once the author leans into his brand of maximalist California noir, gleeful body horror and observations about celebrity, greed, narcissism and treating bodies as commodities. Eddie becomes something like a queer, deranged Beetlejuice, even though the body-hopping mythology occasionally feels like a rip-off of "Men in Black" and "Dawn of the Dead" remake. 

The twist that Poppy is Eddie's biological daughter — and his chosen next host because she's supposedly best suited for fame — finally clicks some ideas into place, but her decision to mutilate herself rather than let him win was especially baffling considering she's a mother. How did she not think this through? That he would just move to her spawn? I feel like my neighbor heard my eyes roll.

My biggest disappointment is that "Bury Your Gays" and "Lucky Day" used their outrageous concepts to make pointed social commentary. Here, the gore often feels like the point. There are sharp ideas about fame and consumption buried in the second half, but they never cohere into the kind of satire I've come to expect from Tingle. Further, questions about Eddie's motivations and the logic behind his violence against so many innocent people are either brushed aside or waved away.

I'm not ready to give up on the author — his imagination remains one of the most original in contemporary horror — but this is the first of his novels that felt genuinely half-baked.

Mara Wilson narrates and does a decent job, though the material doesn't give her much to work with. I'd say this one is a pass in all formats.

Rating (story): 2/5 stars

Rating (narration): 3/5 stars

Format: Audiobook (library loan)

Dates read: July 12 – July 14, 2026

Multi-tasking: Encouraged. Your attention will drift but you aren’t really missing anything special.