Khaw’s prose doesn’t care if the reader can’t keep up. Sentences hit like jagged waves, rolling over each other in dense, poetic heaps. At times, readers will find themselves gasping, not for breath, but for clarity.

Similar to the unsettling discomfort of yanking out one strand of hair or accidentally lifting a nail bed briefly against the edge of a table, Bazterrica’s flavor of horror is breakneck, deliciously nauseating, and will not be easily forgotten in the annals of any reader’s sensational memory.