Rain Corbyn’s Can We Look Directly at It, Just for a Second? is a queer horror novella with an unusually personal view of the apocalypse. Its narrator retreats to the Catskills, convinced the world’s final day has arrived, carrying a lifetime of resentment, desire, shame, and unfinished business. Climate fiction and body horror meet in a landscape where the ocean has swallowed familiar boundaries and the natural world keeps finding strange ways to grow. There’s a wonderfully uncomfortable intimacy to the setup: planetary catastrophe shares space with awkward social encounters and private grievances. Corbyn makes that collision funny, ugly, and emotionally convincing. Even with the world collapsing, being a person remains an exhausting job.

The narrator’s voice gives the book much of its force. They’re caustic, horny, frightened, perceptive, and capable of turning almost any interaction into a prosecution of themselves or somebody else. You can laugh at a petty complaint and then recognize the hurt beneath it a sentence later. Corbyn is especially sharp about the ways therapeutic language, political righteousness, and online habits can shape relationships, including how the vocabulary of care becomes useful to people seeking control. The narrator participates in these habits, too, and their awareness of that keeps the satire interesting. Gender dysphoria, neurodivergence, and the wish to be desired are woven into the narration’s smallest decisions. Who’s looking? What do they see? How much explanation will make being seen feel safe?

As ecological horror, the novella gets under your skin through texture. Algae, insects, fungus, salt water, and damaged flesh make its world feel damp, hungry, and alarmingly alive. The body horror is graphic and sexually explicit, with disgust, attraction, and tenderness often occupying the same image. Corbyn’s comparisons come quickly, drawing on horror movies, internet slang, childhood memories, and ordinary consumer junk. That density can be tiring, particularly when several images compete for attention in a single passage. It also suits a narrator who compulsively translates experience into language, then worries about how that language will be received. The prose’s excess becomes part of the character’s struggle. Fans of weird fiction will find plenty to chew on in the book’s unstable relationship between human bodies and the ecosystems they inhabit.

I appreciated the book’s attention to the hunger for permission: permission to change, to want things, to feel anger, to stop performing goodness for an imagined audience. Its literary horror grows out of that hunger as much as it does from its grotesque imagery. Beneath the jokes and fury is a bruised longing for affection that doesn’t require a flawless explanation of the self. Corbyn keeps that longing complicated, giving the narrator enough vanity and spite to make their vulnerability feel earned. If you enjoy queer horror and experimental climate fiction with a fiercely opinionated voice, this novella offers a concentrated, demanding read. It’s at its best when a revolting image and a painfully familiar feeling arrive together, making you wince for two reasons at once.

Pages: 120 | ISBN : 9781590217900