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As if hauled up squirming from the bowels of the internet, Sex Goblin metabolizes sex writing, popular culture, and autofiction to present the real and the imagined as equally surreal possibilities. In the narrator’s childlike voice, all things become both mundane and strange—a child and their dog fused after a car accident, moments of tenderness amidst frat hazing, witches, and hiking accidents. At turns charming and bizarre, Sex Goblin channels sexual violence through the lens of the absurd to alchemize shame and abuse into something that registers differently than trauma. Sex Goblin is a barely factual but deeply felt field guide to relationships and relatability.
"Sex Goblin vibrates with a kinetic, buzzy energy, pinging between the depraved digital and the lonely truth of the IRL world."
—Tobias Hess, PAPER
"There’s an emotional acuity that sneaks up on you, making the mundane (waiting in a drive-through at Starbucks) and the surreal (a witch who turns an offending man into underwear) feel unpredictable and immediate, like the rumbling before an earthquake, when the ground might crack open."
—Erin Schwartz, Vulture
—Coco Klockner, The Whitney Review
"[A] virtuosic deployment of first-person narrative and literary craftsmanship. . . That it’s funny almost hides that it’s impressive, that we’ve gone from autofiction dupe to gory slapstick to mangled symbology."
—Charlie Markbreiter, 4Columns
"Sex Goblin asserts the importance of individual experience apart from its larger, societal context... Cook encourages us to stand shamelessly alone, owning whatever is wild and dull and stupid about us."
—Gianni Washington, The Chicago Review of Books
"Lauren Cook’s Sex Goblin, newly out from Nightboat Books, slingshots readers between surreal scenes, diaristic musings, list poems and even a writing prompt. As genres shapeshift and merge, so too do bodies—most memorably when a childhood trauma literally bonds a character to a toy poodle."
—Cassie Packard, Frieze
"The characters in Sex Goblin occupy a Tumblr-style register, mixing ha-ha irony with a profound sensitivity and warmth. He writes with a sense of wonder, introspection and sadness about nature, relationships and love."
—Thea McLachlan, Xtra Magazine
"A lustrous alternative to the doomscroll. . . polyvocal, poly-corporeal, and full of moving, quiet optimism."
—Oil Peters, Heavy Feather Review
“It’s not often a book entertains as easily as Sex Goblin does while simultaneously speaking to the monstrousness of being in a body at all.”
—Mathuson Anthony, Book Club Bar
"The knife’s edge of sex and violence, comedy and profoundly blunt misery, mania and self-loathing, reduced into book form.”
—Natalie Marlin, Moon Palace Books