Okay, so the original novella – ‘Baby Fights’ (2023) – was one bastard of a serving of brutal, visceral, no-holds-barred, punching, biting, gouging and bone breaking violence with the utterly taboo use of babies within these forced fights to the death. Essentially dog or cock fighting crossed with the back alley setting of Palahniuk’s ‘Fight Club’ (1996), only using the corruption of pure innocence to enact these despicable bouts of adrenaline-pumping savagery. That’s ‘Baby Fights’ my (possibly degenerate) friends!

Obviously, there was more to the plot than just a novella worth of outrageously taboo violence. Essig gave us a whole story regarding the creation of Ducky’s Baby Fights and how Madison Holzer came to be there – how she’d been forced to be part of the ‘Baby Farm’, made to breastfeed the infant fighters between shows.

With this sequel, Chance takes up the mantel as the new Ducky, starting his own version of Baby Fights. Alongside this we have a parallel running storyline involving Madison once again, as she desperately struggles with drug addiction and her frantic need to get Hunter back. This side of the novel is perhaps the most accomplished aspect of the whole novel – showcasing just how fucking good a writer Essig is. Yeah, he writes some messed up shit from time to time, but damn can the man take us through the gutter of human turmoil too.

For this grizzly sequel, Essig throws down an absolute shit tonne of emotionally heavy depictions of what it is to have an out-of-control junkie habit. Of being dopesick and constantly needing to feed the monkey on the addicts back. It’s hard, harsh and gritty reading – taking you through the mental torture of being an addict, whilst dragging you back through the broken glass gutter time and again.

Honestly, I was not expecting such an exposure to the human psyche within this novel. No disrespect, but it’s the sequel to ‘Baby Fights’ (2023), so the last thing you’d likely envisage would be a gritty journey through the struggles of a junkie mother whose pinning for her infant son. Hell, it’s damn sobering if nothing else!

Combine the two – the drug addition of a broken mother and the rebirth of baby fighting – and it’s one fucker of a recipe for a dark and god damn gritty-as-they-come story. It takes the violence and visceral gore and the outlandishly taboo concept behind the first book and pushes it further towards the cliff edge. No longer are we reading to see how far Essig with take his crazyass idea. No longer are we grinning as he pushes the boundaries of bad taste. We’re now wallowing knee-deep in the emotional brutality of such a mad idea – gawping at the violent mania whilst we lick our emotional wounds from Madison’s plight.

And fuck me does it work as a novel! Essig has taken us that much further down the pathway to degeneracy, with outlandish violence and drug addiction as our tour guides. Our moral compass is kicked off the table, and instead we’re tossed headfirst into a car crash of unbelievable corruption coupled with a mentally broken mother’s utter desperation and despair.

You’ll read some parts of the novel and almost expect to be coughing up blood. The grime, the utter savagery, the hopelessness of humanity – its all on show in the back alleys of Essig’s godawful world. But hell, does it draw you in like a motherfucker. Like moths to a flame, we can’t keep our eyes off the pages. How each punchy, fast-paced chapter swings us back out over the abyss.

Then we have the ending. What a frigging ending it is too. Haunting, brutal, visceral, and cold as Ed Gein’s lifeless stare.

Essig – we’re expecting a third book now! A fucking book to see us over that cliff edge and flung into the pits of hell for knowingly embracing such an abandonment of morality and taste. This shits just got real!

The novel runs for a total of 191 pages.