Razortooth by Stephen Kozeniewski and Stevie Kopas
Publisher: French Press Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, LGBTQ, Historical, Contemporary
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Belladonna Beauregard is an ordinary Georgia peach, worried about nothing in the world more complicated than running around, fishing, and playing in the woods.

Then the bombs drop.

Instantly, America is reduced to ash. Millions die, and in the aftermath, a cruel, vigilante militia seeks to takes over the irradiated Geiger Lands from their base in Belladonna’s commandeered home.

And Belladonna…changes.

Changes into a mutant. A killer. An assassin, enslaved and forced to kill for the very people who destroyed her home and family.

But Belladonna is about to break free, like a butterfly from a bloodstained cocoon. And she’s about to become the legendary slasher known as…

RAZORTOOTH

Survival is a game.

One of the things I liked most about the main character was seeing how she survived so many different catastrophes that should have killed her. Razortooth was a resourceful and intelligent person who paid close attention to her surroundings and was always on alert for danger. While I can’t say I’d necessarily want to meet her in a dark alleyway given how jumpy she could be, I was fascinated by how her difficult childhood and early adulthood shaped her into the warrior she became.

I would have liked to see more world building in this book. Life after a nuclear war would be radically different than anything that came before it, so I was hoping to see more explanations of how people survived in a world where most living things had either been killed off or seriously affected by radiation. Obviously, there is plenty of artistic license to be taken with such a concept and I wouldn’t expect everything to have a scientific explanation, but I still found myself wishing for many more details about how it all worked and how the small fraction of humanity who did survive managed to eke out a living in such a hostile and dangerous environment.

Horror appeals to me in large part because of its willingness to explore topics that many other genres tend to shy away from or even ignore entirely. To give one example, Razortooth lived in a violently sexist society where women were, for the most part, seen as objects to be used instead of people to be respected and listened to. Being exposed to such things can warp people’s minds in all sorts of terrible ways, and I thought the gore and violence in this book was a good metaphor not only for how any sort of prejudice will destroy a society but also for how attempts to resist it can be both consciously and unconsciously misconstrued and fought against by people who want to preserve the status quo and retain their power in it. The beginning and the ending are particularly good examples of this theme once the reader figures out how they tie into the rest of it, but that’s all I can say without sharing spoilers.

Razortooth made me shudder.