Girl Like a Bomb

by Autumn Christian

Overview

When Beverly Sykes finally has sex, she learns that she has a special power that turns her lovers into who they’ve always wanted to be.

Beverly is desperate to lose her virginity. When she ends up falling for the bad boy in her highschool math class, they are both rocked with an experience more powerful than any orgasm. All of her lovers experience a total existential transformation. They become their best selves, or in certain cases, their worst. Beverly becomes the town slut, a stripper, a sexual healer, and a messiah figure. 

In Girl Like a Bomb, with great power comes more than just responsibility. She goes on one hell of a horny heroine’s journey as she gives herself to others over and over to try to save them, but at what price? Beverly finds herself at the center of a twisted, labyrinthine quest where the only way out is through.

Including a new epilogue and teasers for her new novel, Autumn Christian presents a dark femme reclamation of the superhero genre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781955904919
Publisher:	CLASH Books
Publication date:	01/30/2024
Pages:	298
Sales rank:	186,113
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Autumn Christian is a fiction writer from Texas. She is the author of The Crooked God Machine, We Are Wormwood, and Ecstatic Inferno, and has written for several video-games, including Battle Nations and State of Decay 2. Her forthcoming novel from CLASH Books is due in 2024.

Read an Excerpt

I’d never been in love but I always imagined it would feel like this. We moved toward the bed. He lowered me down on the sheets, knelt and kissed my ankles and thighs. Everywhere his lips touched me it was like he was eating light, sucking up the heat stuck to my skin. Being touched by him was like being pushed into the underworld. His hands slid up my thighs. I grabbed the sheets underneath me and squeezed as if to orient myself, back into the physical world, so that I wouldn’t be lost in his touches. I wondered what horrible things he’d done. How many people he killed. 

He gripped my shoulder in one hand with a murderous and cold pressure. “Do you feel this?” he asked. I realized he’d slid a finger inside of me. I shook my head. “Not surprising,” he said, as his finger worked inside of me. “I had suspected that might be the case.” He slid another finger into me. “Would you like to know why?” he asked. “Why you can feel nothing?” I knew I couldn’t lie. Not again. “Yes,” I said, my voice crumbling. “It is because you have no passion in your life,” he said. “A girl like you has been run ragged by the desires of others, and you have forgotten your own. The girl with the magic cunt has no magic left inside of her.” 

Editorial Reviews

"Girl Like a Bomb is a book like a bomb— explosive, heavy and dangerous. A must read by an exciting new voice." —Brian Keene, author of The Rising and Pressure

"Fun, fast, and fascinating. Girl Like a Bomb hooked me and held me.” —Peter Clines, New York Times Bestseller, author of Paradox Bound

"Girl Like a Bomb is a journey through the gratifying, delicious, and sometimes vicious horror show of having a body — particularly a femme body. This is a book of blood and guts, of humanity and brokenness, woven by passages of beauty and smart storytelling. Salacious & sea-deep, this is a book for readers who are hungry for both a party & meaning."—Lisa Marie Basile, author of City Witchery

From the Publisher

02/03/2020

In Christian’s compassionate if uneven erotic fabulist tale (after Ecstatic Inferno), a teenage girl heals troubled boys with love. After 15-year-old Beverly Sykes decides to lose her virginity to a “bad boy” named Spider, who carried a “spit cup in the cab of his truck and thin white scars on his forearms he refused to talk about,” she and Spider share a transformative experience (“the whites of his eyes grew like cracks of light through a darkened gate”) that leads him to regret stealing from his mother. Beverly goes on have a similar impact on other dropouts and screw-ups, and she is raped by a math teacher who hopes to be touched by the magic her sex partners have testified to. After graduation, she throws herself into a cycle of sex work and sex therapy and gains an army of fans, until she becomes numb and realizes she must save herself. Beverly’s unraveling is depicted in a series of repetitive scenes, though Christian effectively conjures Beverly’s ability to notice the sacred beauty in misfits and outcasts (a girl’s frizzy hair “casts shadows on the walls like eagles and cranes”). While Christian’s tale poses interesting questions about what people owe to one another, the story unravels as Beverly drifts into adulthood. Like its characters, this thoughtful take on self-assertion, sex, and healing shines despite its flaws. (Mar.)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly noted this book was self-published.

Publishers Weekly