Morsel by Carter Keane | Horror Fiction

This one releases next Tuesday and you can pre-order it now.

My 2 Cents for Free!

Morsel by Carter Keane

Released April 14, 2025

Source: Netgalley

See more @ Goodreads

Comparisons are such a wild thing. I realize they’re trying to sell a book to a targeted audience, but they almost never feel quite right to me.

“The Blair Witch Project meets The Ritual, with a generous helping of The Menu, in Morsel, a delicious folk horror novella perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Paul Tremblay.”

To be totally honest, the cover is the reason I chose this as a READ NOW pick from Netgalley. I was thinking it would lean heavily into the bog/fungi horror trend of late especially when they invoked T. Kingfisher up there, but it never goes there. Morsel is such a weird little story. It sort of fits some of those comps but only for brief moments in time. Instead it’s more of a mashup of many things including taking a scathing look at the late stage capitalism that works people to death (which is the backbone of the story), sexism, a rather out of place (if you ask me) daddy-kink, redneck deep woods horror, multi-level marketing hellscapes, dark thriller tropes, unreliable narrator, doggie in peril (ahhhh!!!), memory gaps, useless podcast excerpts and several others things of which I will not speak because it will spoil. It tackles a lot in a small page count and at times it was a bit too much and bewildering for me. I think it may have worked better if it had been more focused on a few of those aspects instead of jumping from one thing to another. I believe this book is a debut and I’d definitely read this author in the future because despite my slight disappointment in its scattered plot twists, the book MOVED and I never wanted to put it down.

Anyhow, this story is about Lou who is working to improve her life and help out her ill mother who has always worked too much. She’s in a bit of a tight bind at work because she lost some time because of her mother’s situation and when approached by the sexy bossman with a strange proposition to trudge out to a remote site on the pretense of doing an inspection she accepts. Or something like that. Her best friend Emma warns her it’s a terrible idea and Emma is not wrong. There’s a ton of setup to what basically leads to Lou taking a long walk near and in the woods with her dog Ripley where everything goes sideways pretty freaking fast. It’s at this point where the book really ramps up and never slows down.

The last ¼ or so starts to feel like a fever dream but it all somewhat comes together in the wild and gory end. I liked it and I enjoyed reading about Lou, Emma and Ripley but it’s definitely an overstuffed weird one!

Final Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Publisher Plot Synopsis 

The Blair Witch Project meets The Ritual, with a generous helping of The Menu, in Morsel, a delicious folk horror novella perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Cassandra Khaw, and Paul Tremblay.

Lou did what the children of parents with back-breaking, poor paying jobs are supposed to do; pulled up her bootstraps, went to college, and got an office job with coworkers who won’t stop talking about their multi-level marketing scheme disguised as self-betterment.

Determined to lift her ill mother out of poverty before it's too late, and in the spirit of climbing the corporate ladder, Lou accepts an assignment in the rural hills of Ohio. She quickly finds herself stranded in the middle of nowhere with a sabotaged truck, a dog she’s determined to keep safe, and something stalking her through the ancient Appalachian woods.

If she can’t escape the woods in time, she’ll come face to face with the fact that her job isn’t the only thing that wants to eat her alive.

Morsel is a chilling testament to the burden of generational poverty and the all-consuming nature of capitalism, where the monster and the monstrous, in the end, are not the same.