Review: "Wet Hot Allosaurus Summer" by Lola Faust

 

Wet Hot Allosaurus Summer by Lola Faust
First published 2020
★★★★ (also one star, five stars, and everything in between)

Y'all...here is the list of suggested trigger warnings that Faust's sensitivity readers came up with:

Dinosaurs, sex, dinosaur sex, ornithoscelidaphobia, fisting, vore, gore, pain, blood, sadism, masochism, captivity, camping, cults, candy, insects, arm trauma, shoulder trauma, amputation, interspecies sex, menstruation, brains, carnivorism, sexism, misogyny, speciesism, classism, ableism, abusive parent, abusive coworker, infidelity, pornography, fire, water, forests, farms (working and dormant), unorthodox use of personal lubricant, implicit and explicit threat of sexual assault, inaccurate dinosaur anatomy (for the sake of the story), accurate dinosaur anatomy (for the sake of accuracy), feathers, Canada, South Dakota, Wal-Mart, cornfields, cow-tipping, barns, pickup trucks, threat of police violence, guns, gunshot wounds, immigration paperwork, portable toilets, decapitation, taffy-pulling, animal slaughter, religion, PTSD, venture capital, vegetables (loc. 9)

You might or might not regret Googling "vore slang." Go on, I dare you.

This is the third(!) of Faust's books that I've read, and upon reflection I was eased in very, very gently with Dino Stud. One of the first things that happens in Wet Hot Allosaurus Summer involves an injury that leaves the heroine's arm spurting blood and dangling uselessly. Time to seek medical attention, right? Or pass out from blood loss and pain? Nope! Time to have racy, blood-pumping sex with a dinosaur! (I'd like to suggest "inaccurate medical information" and "lack of medical care" as additions to the list of trigger warnings.) Don't worry, though. If you're thinking "gee, of course all I'd want while bleeding out is a good dino bang, that's not weird at all" – it only gets stranger. And stickier. And a lot of other things.

I don't really know how to rate this. I preferred it to Triceratops and Bottoms for the simple reason that I prefer novels and novellas to short stories, but while Dino Stud was basically exactly what I was expecting (god, how innocent and uninitiated I was), and Triceratops and Bottoms was off the rails but entertainingly so, this is about ten thousand times more horrifying, and I guess by now I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Or both. Five stars: yes. One star: yes. Read at your own risk.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.