Cassandra Troyan - Her narratives form a feedback loop with the sound a human brain makes as she squishes it under her boot: Please don’t tell anyone I’m crazy. I couldn’t bear for people to be collectively and overly concerned.

“Cassandra Troyan goes for the throat, and once she's in the throat she goes for the gonads, then the brain. No sex is safe, as is no being. Let her re-teach you how to cower.” - Blake Butler

“Troyan's is a voracious language that gurgles itself, spits back up and swallows again only to become a new hungry hole, always phoenixing, always being born, never finished filling. In her 10000 rebirths we can finally see our own wants clearly: stained, wetdreamt, slit and sticky, but innocent in never having been informed why we are alive. This book is very dirty and very, very pure.” - Melissa Broder

“This book will disturb you to the same degree that you should have been disturbed before you read it. Cassandra Troyan's aphoristic poems reminded me that things are grimmer and life is sadder and filthier than I have will to believe, no matter how often I hear about Jersey Shore. Troyan fills her cup with blood and mucous and says "take, drink." She says, "The body is meat. The meat has feels." Her narratives form a feedback loop with the sound a human brain makes as she squishes it under her boot. She can be as abject as Bataille or as sick as Cèline, but through it all, maybe best of all, she is also funny.” - Adam Robinson

Throne of Blood makes me believe Cassandra Troyan chews razorblades and has freezing skin and needles for fingers, but for some reason, I don’t feel like shying away as she comes closer. Maybe it’s because I sense a sort of hidden warmth she has for her demons. They’re like dozens of hands reaching out that scare you, but don’t mean to.

When I first started reading fiction as a method of learning about writing, I was obsessed with the grotesque, but it feels like Troyan has leveled up the concept here. For roughly a third of the book, I read the speakers as being inhuman simply because they seemed so far removed from humanity that I refused to believe they could be like me (which sounds like a pretty fine accomplishment to me).
Those that are human are twisted with desires to lash out, to be scrubbed clean or wholly disfigured, or to be filled to burst, all in hopes of finding some connection to the real. Sex, one of the only avenues of release available to the people of ToB, is so vital that other icons and symbols of vitality become commingled with it into a form of life slurry that fascinates the speaker.
The disgusting people of ToB, all wounded in the head but still hard to pity, build their world around you as you read, and eventually force you into their frame of mind, as is the result of the best grotesque literature. The building anxiety becomes more concrete until transforming into a nightmare where any similarities to reality only heighten the terror.
When you have the darkness, you have to play with it in some constructive way or it’ll come out how you don’t want it to.  Plenty of this play is in action in ToB as people both fearfully obsess over and fulfill their most primal fantasies. Cassandra, you wild, loving mother to these fucked-up babies, I hope you can bear more, because I could read this forever. - Shaun Gannon


Throne of Blood begins with a Preamble. The Preamble sets the tone for the book, just like the Preamble to the United States Constitution is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution’s fundamental purposes and guiding principles. Presumably, the poem would provide some of those for this book, Throne of Blood.
The Preamble begins with lyrical horror. The narrator is unbothered by dead women crowding the drained lake and the house, even when their bodies are used for decoration or masturbation by the male character. The narrator’s point of view changes when it becomes clear that the male character is the one making women into corpses.
The horror and violence, more specifically, violence against women, casts a long shadow over the rest of the book. Where the Preamble takes on horror in a narrative mode, the rest of the book inverts that formula and approachesit in a more figurative or linguistic or speculative way:
While, the possibility of horror, fear and dread, are not explicitly present in the rest of the text, the Preamble works as Chekov’s gun, even though (spoiler alert) there isn’t really anything to foreshadow since the remainder of the book is considerably less linear and narrative. Even though the rest isn’t what I would call a story, the poems are still haunted by the dead girls.
I think the book manages to do a lot of things very successfully, from the disgust, horror, and repulsion of the Preamble, to a candid and intimate lyricism that comes later in poems like Fragile Kingdom. That poem could stand as a synecdoche for the work; it seems like text and the design are hardly holding together, dreadfully balanced, about to collapse. The work is annihilating itself, as are most of the narrators. Narrator is maybe a funny word to use since it seems like the concept of narration is not dismissed, but damaged in the work.
Even the layout lends to the reading of the text as flung open, with the words left and right justified on the recto and verso respectively. The titles are on the lower outside corner oriented perpendicular to the rest of the text, reading from bottom to top, which make it particularly easy to simply continue through the text as if it were one long work.
Search for Throne of Blood, and you find a Japanese film based on MacBeth, which makes a lot of sense. It takes an awful lot of corpses to make a book.
Sometimes the blood stops flowing, or maybe it doesn’t. This is from The Castle That Only God Knows.  There are multiple distinct tones and voices in the book. While some come from a sort of dream horror world others come from a world with MacBook Pros. Then there are dry lakes full of bodies and head smashing. Then there are poems that are possessed by lyricism. Then there are klonopin poems, lists of side effects, lists of substances consumed.
Sometimes the least lyrical moments are the most plaintive:
Overall the book is harsh, not gentle. It arrives at a sublime through violence, horror, and decay. It is still interested in the sublime.
Throne of Blood is an impassioned distance. It’s not a thing that can be attained or obtained.
Throne of Blood is an explicitly hard work because the hard thing it is doing is trying to approach the sublime through annihilation of the self. This isn’t always an easy thing to do or read. Where at one point the annihilation of the self would have been through the experience of “Nature” or “God” or “Love” here it is the experience of horror, banality, language, sex, and yes, CHICKEN SALAD SANDWICHES. - Leif Haven