A Horror, SciFi, Satirical RomCom Not Not About Dating Corpses
For Human Use by Sarah G. Pierce
Pages: 435 Genre: horror sci-fi (and also all those other things)
Rating: 2 Stars
Liv is the new startup that is changing the world: you can sign up to be matched (like dating apps) with a corpse that will stay in your house. Tom, a venture capitalist, knows this is insane. Who would want to coexist with a corpse? This cannot possibly be a profitable business. But while Auden, the founder, may be an insufferably arrogant idiot, but he's also very charismatic. And Liv takes over. Tom is beside himself, and it doesn't help that the first woman he's ever actually taken an interest in is Mara, who is in far deeper than she'd ever wanted to be.
I knew this was going to be a weird book when I decided to read it, and I actually found the weirdest part — the societal impact of a dating app for corpses — was brilliantly executed. The beginning, where we (through Tom's eyes) watch people accept the absurd with misused therapy-speak and twisted social justice points, as well as general social media stupidity, was creative and engaging. I also liked the end, which I will not spoil but was primarily what I was expecting to see from this book based on the description. Unfortunately, the entire middle of this book is bogged down by finance jargon, a technically-it's-not-incest love triangle, and us watching two grown adults fail to have a hundred conversations in what basically amounts to an alternate universe. While this book and concept had a lot of promise, the execution killed its momentum before it really got a chance.
Tom was a drag. In the normal world, he would be the most generic guy you've ever met; the only reason he stands out is because he's a normal guy who lives in Crazytown. His main character status feels unearned outside of luck and chance. He's not a particularly bad guy, I just stopped caring about him. Ever attempt to give him personality fell flat for me. He was a vessel for the story, nothing more. Especially when you compare him to Auden and Mara, the other two main characters. But nearly the entire book is told from Tom's point of view, for whatever reason.
Auden, who by all rights was a fascinating character, was a mystery meant for only himself to understand. Why does he create this startup? Why does he feel so strongly about it? Then, once it goes wrong (not a spoiler, what did you think the book was about), why does he end up where he does? You'll never know. But don't worry, you will get another chapter about why Tom is ashamed of having anxiety problems. It's not that I need everything to have a clear answer. I like when books trust me to do some of the legwork. But leaving Auden so mysterious didn't feel like it was trusting me, it just felt like the story was lacking. Like we were telling the wrong story.
Also, I'm sorry if this counts as a spoiler but I think it's important (and it's not treated as a huge secret, you learn it very early on): I hate "it's technically not incest" stories. If fictional refer to each other as siblings and talk/behave as if you're family members first, or if they plausibly could were they not romantic interests, I'm not interested in them dating. Maybe it's the Hamlet fan in me, but I'm not into it. I get why this was important to this story overall, but it was a character detail about Auden and Mara that I couldn't get over.
Honestly, the main reason I feel like it could've been written around was because of how this book treated sex in general. Believe me, I'm grateful that the book was not about people having sex with corpses. But it's not NOT about that. Look at the cover: "Modern dating is dead." Despite the branding, the book dances around the idea of sex as a concept, barely acknowledging it outside of a few lines. And while I understand why, it did start to feel like the ignored elephant in the room. It's a conversation ender being conveniently ignored. We're talking about a corpse's right to autonomy while not actually using our words about the main issue there. And it's the same thing with the step-sibling romance. We twist and turn our way through narration to not acknowledge the most uncomfortable part of both of these concepts, which weakens the whole conversation.
Unfortunately for Mara, I didn't care about either of her relationships. If Part 1 and 3 of this book are primarily about the impact of Liv on the world, then Part 2 was primarily about Mara and Tom. And oh my God they were so boring. But it was particularly agonizing because of how the book was written. We would flip back and forth between Tom and Mara's point of view, where they would explain their own thoughts and the presumed thoughts of the other person in detail. For what felt like at least a quarter of the book. Corpses were a distant memory as I had to watch a 35 and 40 year old experience high school levels of miscommunication in explicit detail with no real resolution. And I'm supposed to root for these two? Based on what? Mara's trauma-informed opinion on romance that is meant to be feminism for her refusing to acknowledge? No, please just tell me more about the corpse influencer who does make-up routines for dead people.
The ending was also weird. It was back to the original satirical-horror style of the start that I loved so much, but the literal writing was weird. In one scene, there were multiple section breaks (you know, in chapters where there's a dividing line to bump you forward in time, usually marked with a physical line) that didn't progress the scene at all. You could've just left those out and it would've made it a lot easier to read. I'm not sure what the intended affect there was, but it didn't work. And then the last chapter went back to quirky romcom, so unfortunately the final moments lost me again.
Remembering this book makes me so sad, because I really loved the good parts. It was fun and exaggerated and crazy and weird in the best ways. But we were exploring it through the eyes of a finance bro named Tom who was dealing with his own entirely-unrelated issues. It's such a shame, because this had ever chance to be a fantastic book.
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