Sex Goblin

Sex Goblin vibrates with a kinetic, buzzy energy, pinging between the depraved digital and the lonely truth of the IRL world.

Maybe it’s transsexual Ovidian Metamorphoses: a voice that always has a cock or pussy at just the right moment for the story, whether that consists of a dog-human chimera emerging from a terrible car accident, a witch turning a man into underwear, a lesbian tryst with a softball player, an after-workout blowjob, a poppers PSA, a frat hazing, and so on.

[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.

A lustrous alternative to the doomscroll. . . polyvocal, poly-corporeal, and full of moving, quiet optimism.

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.

The knife’s edge of sex and violence, comedy and profoundly blunt misery, mania and self-loathing, reduced into book form.

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.

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.

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.