STARRED Book Review: Bloodless We Go Buried

Reviewed by Addison Ciuchta

A lyrically sharp and abstractly horrifying exploration of identity and grief under the thumb of an oppressive authority

Bloodless We Go Buried is the second book in the Rimwalker Series. The book follows Lu, a father struggling to keep his sickly son safe in the aftermath of the Cataclysm, an apocalyptic event that ended with humanity living in the Dome under the reign of Salience, a governing body set on keeping people distracted, separated, and too busy to fight back.

Lu, whose legs are paralyzed, moves by dragging himself around the hallways of their home, lost in grief for his wife who died. When a strange creature visits him in the night and Salience comes for his son, Lu is left to reckon with finding something to live for.

Bloodless We Go Buried is stunningly written with sharp metaphors and precise word choice that cut to the heart of Lu’s struggle. Lu, a lover of mythology, structures his life around story, and it shows in the way he approaches what he experiences as stranger and stranger happenings occur to him.

Lu, resistant to the plying of Salience and the Dome where humanity now lives, has a keen understanding of what’s happening to him and those in his neighborhood, called Hamlet No. 5.2, in a way that others don’t, allowing the reader to get a better, though still abstract, sense of the oppression they live under. As one of the only people who somehow retained memories from before the Cataclysm, language for him, and for the author, are tools of exposure, of identity, and of truth.

“He was tiring of a story that was going nowhere, a story moving forward by only looking back, and soon he fell into the lower altitude of memory.”

The worldbuilding is well developed, woven throughout the story in a way that makes it intriguing enough and abstract enough to hint at the oppression without being overdone. The sparse details speak to the horror that Lu and the survivors now live under. Salience dictates who lives and who dies. Salience dictates who lives where. Salience keeps their people too busy, too distracted by nightly soap operas and a false sun to maintain any attempt at rebellion.

“No, there was just him, just them, a war wages from the inside-out. A war waged heart first.”

The horror here comes from both the gross, abstract creatures Lu encounters in the fit of his grief, but also from Salience and the society that lives on under its thumb. For those who don’t like gross and weird “monsters,” this may not be the horror book for you. Lu has experiences with a woman with a horse head, a terrifyingly strong lizard creature, and, at the start of the book, a monster made from the sewage under his house, just to name a few. It’s strange, almost hallucinatory at times, leaving Lu and by extension the reader, with an unstable, uncertain grasp on what’s really happening.

“That to endure any more, to push through the threshold, was to sin. To take what was not being given. That is, to take too much.”

The only negative I’d say is that the abstractness is sometimes too much, with a few occasions in which it isn’t clear what actually happens to Lu. What is real and not real? But that opaqueness seems intentional, serving a purpose for the mythological feeling of the narrative, playing into Lu’s struggle with grief, with Salience, and with his new reality.

“The communal plunge of the cosmos. So it is with death and decay. The pull on everything and everyone. And they win, eventually.”

Bloodless We Go Buried is an excellent horror novel that reckons with identity and loss in the face of an oppressive authority and the aftermath of an apocalypse. It’s part science fiction, part horror, part mythology, and wholly original.

Thank you for reading Addison Ciuchta’s book review of Bloodless We Go Buried by D. Firth Griffith! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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