Choose your own grief.
You See It Too | AJ Malachite | Slashic Horror Press | 24 June 2026 |
You See It Too is A.J. Malachite’s debut, a queer gamebook horror from Slashic Horror Press that drops you, second person, into an East Texas bayou after a light that should not exist. Three student lovers go looking for a will-o’-the-wisp and find something with wings, larvae and a taste for crucified hosts. The novella forks across forty-odd short chapters and four endings, and the interactive form becomes its cruellest weapon. This is body horror, folk horror and Southern Gothic braided into a maze, and no route through the swamp lets you save everyone you brought.
Folk horror rebuilt from a bug textbook, soft in the places that count and nasty everywhere else, You See It Too does something with the gamebook the gamebook was never built to do. It puts your hand on the wheel, then shows you the wheel was never attached to anything.
You See It Too by AJ Malachite: A Queer Gamebook Horror Where No One Walks Out Whole
Every branching-path story sells you the same small lie: choose well enough and everyone you love walks out of the woods with you. Pick the safe fork. Keep the group together. Don’t follow the light. Then the people you came in with are the people you leave with. AJ Malachite builds a whole swamp around that lie and drowns it. You See It Too is a gamebook. Second person, present tense, forty-odd short chapters that fork and loop through a Texas bayou. No matter how you steer its three students, the maze takes at least one of them off you before you reach the road.
The set-up is lean. You, Gray and Jeremy are seniors at Sweetbay University. You have slipped past a locked cemetery gate to solve a “spooklight,” a glow that flickers in a private, half-wild patch of the preserve near the Louisiana line. Gray is an ecology major who grew up out here and wants a natural answer. Jeremy is your roommate and wants a ghost. You want the light, and you want the two of them, and Malachite is plain about saying so. The three are lovers. It is drawn in a few strokes rather than announced, and that easy queerness is the soil the horror grows from, not a flag stuck on top of it.
What the light turns out to be is the book’s smartest trick. The fifolet, the local name for a will-o’-the-wisp, is not a ghost and not swamp gas. It is a firefly the size of a dog, and its glow is a lure. The larvae need a living host, so somebody has been crucifying people in the deep swamp and letting the grubs eat their way out through the throat.
The light became a legend by showing up for a few months once every fifteen or twenty years. Malachite folds that gap in as a breeding cycle, part cicada, part firefly. It is folk horror rebuilt from a bug textbook. Having a science major on hand lets Malachite explain how it works without breaking the spell. Gray names what you are looking at. The naming makes it worse.
The body horror is the real engine, and it is very good. Early on, Jeremy goes through a rotten board and lands with his calf pushed onto a cypress knee. The book slows right down to catalogue it. The wood shredding the flesh on the way out. The mosquitoes settling on the wound. The wet tearing sound as the others lift him off the stake. Malachite has done the reading on how a leg actually comes apart, and the detail lands because the narrator keeps cracking jokes through it.
Pine needles float in the bloody green water and the scene gets called “some kind of horror-on-the-bayou Christmas card.” That line is the whole register in miniature. The gallows humour is not there to soften the gore. It is there because these are frightened kids in their twenties, and it is exactly how frightened kids in their twenties talk when something terrible is happening to a friend.
Close-read the set piece in the train car and you can see the craft. A woman hangs nailed to a crude cross, barely alive, her arms stretched to rubber by her own weight. She raises her head. An orange glow rises in her throat. Then the thing comes out of her mouth in a spray of blood and latches onto Gray’s shoulder.
Malachite stages it beat by beat, each sentence turning the screw a notch: the gasp, the light, the colour shifting from red to sick yellow-green, the shine of small spiky legs, the launch. Nothing is rushed and nothing is held past its use. Reading this prose is like wading the bayou it describes. The surface stays flat and warm and almost pleasant, and then something with teeth breaks it right under your feet.
The swamp itself is the deepest bit of world-building, a whole ecosystem tuned to killing you. The fifolets are only the start of it. There are sundews grown to the size of a small room, folding their sticky spines around a shot hog and dissolving it to slop. There are glowing mushrooms that poison the feral dogs who eat them.
There is a hog trap that becomes an abattoir, a gator that solves one problem and creates a worse one, water snakes, the parasites Texas lakes are famous for. Malachite lets Gray reel off the science for each one, and the effect over a whole novella is a place where every living thing is either predator or bait. That is the point the plot is quietly making. This land has been farmed for death so long that the horror has soaked all the way down into the soil.
Underneath the gore, the book is tender, and it earns the word. The three lovers have a private grammar, a way of teasing and touching that Malachite sketches without ever stopping to explain it to you. Best of all is Gray’s hunting knife, an heirloom from a dead grandfather, engraved with the initials he had before he transitioned.
He keeps it not out of shame but because he loved the man, and he has always meant to have it re-cut someday. It is a small, exact grace note, the kind of detail that tells you the writer knows these people as more than pieces to move around a board. When the maze starts spending their lives, that groundwork is what makes the losses hurt.
The form is the bigger gamble, and mostly it pays. Holding second person and present tense across dozens of forking nodes is a real feat of control, and the reader never loses the thread of who you are or where the light is. The branches converge on shared beats, so several routes funnel into the same fight, the same drive, the same choice, which is efficient and, I think, deliberate. This is where the maze earns its darkness.
On the shelf, You See It Too sits in a lineage most readers will half-remember from childhood. The gamebook goes back to Choose Your Own Adventure and the Fighting Fantasy books, and horror found the form early with the Give Yourself Goosebumps line. Malachite takes that machinery somewhere those never went, into adult queer body horror with real blood and real stakes.
For the doomed group in the wild, the closest cousin is Scott Smith’s The Ruins. That one strands young people in a lovely, hostile place and lets a patient plant pick them apart. Those giant sundews would be at home in it. For the deeper engine, look at the family. They have fed their land with outsiders for as long as anyone can remember, and the shadow there is Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” The Geiers are old money, a local line, and their horror is not a monster but an inheritance they keep going.
That is the theme doing the heavy lifting. The fifolets are frightening, but the people who farm them are the point. The dedication says it out loud, tying the queer characters to the gulf coast prairie, still here after everything done to it, and the book keeps that link tight. Land, wealth and old blood decide who is spent. The students trespassing for a bit of wonder are just this cycle’s raw material. One of the killers turns out to be a classmate, wealthy, local, bored, who calls a night of murder “chore night.” That is the coldest line in the book, and a bug never says it.
You See It Too is Malachite’s first book, though not their first published fiction. There is short work before it, in anthologies like meat4meat and Saturday Mourning Television. It reads like someone who has been sharpening these knives for a while and finally got a table to lay them on. It is short, it is nasty, it is soft in the places that count, and it does something with the gamebook that the gamebook was never built to do. A five would ask the friends to feel as distinct as their wounds. This is a four, and a confident one.
You went into the swamp to explain the light. The light has been waiting a very long time for someone to explain it back.
You See It Too by AJ Malachite
You, Gray, and Jeremy are students at a small university in East Texas, and the three of you have tumbled into a mostly unofficial threeway relationship—especially after bonding over your shared interest in a local spooklight out in the nearby nature preserve. To kick off senior year, you decide to follow the light out into the swamp and discover its true source. After all, Gray knows the preserve like the back of his hand.
What could go wrong?
The answer to the unexplained is at your fingertips. Your fate, and theirs, is in your hands. Come and see what’s waiting for you deep in the bayous.
Book 3 in the Extremities series takes you to a creepy swamp where nothing is what it seems. This extreme, queer narrative maze will drown you in terror. Enjoy.
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