TL;DR: Wretch is a sweat-soaked Chicago splatter-crime nightmare where a human trial at a pharma lab turns into body horror with a hard-on for chaos and collateral damage. It lands as loud, fast, and grossly committed, best for readers who want their thrills blunt and bloody, and don’t mind the prose leaning into repetitive excess to keep the pedal down.

Wretch starts at a dead sprint, swearing in your face like it’s trying to fog a mirror. “Fucking Mondays,” Detective Donnie Lynch thinks, inching through Chicago traffic toward yet another body, already simmering in road-construction misery and the everyday nihilism of the job. The voice is blunt, hyper-masculine, and committed to grime. You’re not here for tasteful dread. You’re here for heatstroke, bad decisions, and a city that feels like it’s being cooked from the top down.

Lynch is a Chicago detective carrying personal wreckage, including the aftermath of testicular cancer and a marriage that didn’t survive the slow poison of fatigue and shame. In parallel, Derek Hoffman enters a pharmaceutical research situation at Peithos Labs, a “week-long program” to make money as a human guinea pig, and the “what if it goes horribly wrong?” premise ignites. The novel crosscuts between cops, criminals, and Derek’s accelerating transformation as lust, violence, and bodily breakdown spill into the streets.

The structure is an escalation ladder in the purest sense: 46 chapters plus a “Post Pandemonium” coda, arranged like a long fuse with multiple ignition points. At first, the tension is procedural and personal. Lynch’s headspace is crowded with regrets and bodily anxiety, rendered in unglamorous detail. The cancer backstory isn’t subtle, but it is specific, and specificity is often what keeps this kind of book from becoming pure cartoon. Then Derek’s sections kick the volume knob. The heat becomes oppressive, the senses “enhanced,” the palette turns red, and the book starts running on a chemical engine that keeps feeding itself.

This is third-person that rides close to its characters, and it’s especially interested in Derek’s interior monologue as it degrades into appetites, fragments, and mantra-like thoughts. You get the sense of a mind being overwritten, which is effective horror on its own, even before the body-horror fireworks. Lynch’s sections, by contrast, lean into cynical competence and pain, with a steadier tonal line. The tradeoff is that dialogue and internal narration can tilt into the same gravelly register across different characters. When it hits, it feels like a chorus of broken people. When it misses, it can feel like everyone is shouting from the same barstool.

Character work is functional, sometimes surprisingly human, sometimes aggressively pulpy. Lynch’s contradictions are clear: he’s capable, he’s bitter, he’s self-aware enough to call his own wallowing “bullshit,” and he’s still stuck inside it. Derek is less a “mystery” than a pressure vessel, and the novel shows you exactly what kind of monster it’s interested in building: a man driven by sensation, aggression, and compulsive seeking. Side characters like Tyrell pop in to widen the social panorama and to demonstrate how the city becomes a hunting ground once the predator is loose.

Chicago is rendered as hot, dirty, and increasingly unreal, with “record-breaking temperatures” and streets that radiate “infernal heat.” The atmosphere mechanics are blunt-force, but they work. Heat makes everyone meaner, hornier, stupider, and the book uses that as accelerant. The recurring motifs are bodily: sweat, stink, hunger, erection, waste. Sometimes it’s grotesque in a way that’s almost comedic, like a dare the book is making to itself. Sometimes it’s just gross. Either way, it’s committed.

Wagner understands “shown vs implied,” but he mostly chooses shown, and shown means you are going to see some shit. The chainsaw scene reads like splatterpunk theater, complete with blood mist and exhaust, and it tells you early that the book won’t flinch. Derek’s spiral is choreographed through episodes of pursuit and consumption, where the disgust is the point, and the aftermath is often a quick reset into the next compulsion. There are also explicit sexual menace beats, including threats of rape and non-consensual framing, which the book uses to underline Derek’s danger and the world’s vulnerability. If that’s a hard no for you, it’s a hard no.

Under the gore and libido, Wretch is obsessed with the body as fate and the body as weapon. It’s about masculinity as wound, as performance, as chemical imbalance, as rage you can buy in a lab. Lynch’s storyline drags shame and identity into the open through illness, divorce, and the fear of being “less of a man,” while Derek’s storyline turns the same fear outward into predation and domination. Layered on top is distrust of corporate systems and the idea that “miracle pills” have shadow costs, and once the cost is paid, the city becomes the checkout counter.

Jeremy Wagner is a long-time death-metal musician associated with the band Broken Hope, and his author platform often intertwines extreme music culture with horror and crime fiction sensibilities. Prior novels including The Armageddon Chord and Rabid Heart, alongside short fiction and craft-writing contributions, which helps explain why Wretch reads like a veteran of high-intensity genre pacing rather than a newcomer. In an interview with Rue Morgue, he’s discussed moving between music and horror fiction, and that cross-media aggression shows up here in the set-piece mentality and the willingness to go maximal on sensation.

The book wants fallout. It does not quietly resolve. It pushes toward a “pandemonium” crescendo and then gives you an afterward-shaped exhale, which feels consistent with a story built on acceleration rather than puzzle-box closure. The ending feels more like a scorch mark than a bow, and while that won’t satisfy readers who want justice neatly packaged, it fits the novel’s thesis that some systems, once breached, do not snap back into place.

The commitment is real, the momentum is often excellent, and the atmosphere is sweaty as hell. But the prose can get repetitive in its emphasis on bodily fluids and arousal-as-engine, and the shock tactics occasionally flatten nuance. Still, if you like crime-forward splatterpunk with a monstrous-lust premise and you want your horror loud, nasty, and moving fast, you’ll have a good time. If you want restraint, tenderness, or a more psychologically varied cast, you’re going to feel pummeled.

Wretch by Jeremy Wagner,
published February 24, 2026 by Dead Sky Publishing.