Book Review: Piñata – Tory Favro

 2/16/2025 5:06 PM CST

Dear Reader,

This week we are doing another book review. This one is a doozy.

In the meantime just know that I still have my two mammoth blogs in the works, one about Street Fighter, and one about David Lynch’s film INLAND EMPIRE. (The INLAND EMPIRE essay is promising to be so long that people are urging me to publish it as its own stand alone work. We will see. I have to finish it first.)

I already have my next review lined up because I read a wonderful short story called, “Lucifer Rising” by Torres Cascado and I would love to tell you more about that.

Today, it is my treat to tell you about one of the nastiest stories I have ever read. Without further ado:

 A Relentless Story of Madness, Sickness, and Disgust

Review: Piñata – Tory Favro

My Verdict: Utter Madness. Not for the Faint of Heart. Nasty Good Time.

A short, brutal read.

Yet again, I want to talk to you all about a book I found through Books of Horror (the wonderful Facebook group). I had recently discovered the wonders of Kindle on my phone and getting my hands on e-books for great deals. I shot out a request to BoH to get some recommendations for good horror under $5.

I got all sorts of great recommendations from all sorts of people, but Angel Ramon (author of Frogs and Margaritas) jumped in with a whole list. On the list was Piñata by Tory Favro. I looked it up and immediately recognized the cover.

I didn’t know where I had seen it before, but I knew I had, and that I was already somewhat interested before Angel even made the recommendation. I’m a sucker for a good eye-catching cover, and I love the psychedelic promise of violence through bright colors. Kudos to Allison Olbrich and KL Alister for their great work on the cover, and Ruth Anna Evans for the concept.

Let’s start by saying: If you need any trigger warnings, this may not be the book for you, champ. Let us not mince words; if you are not already experienced in Extreme Horror or Splatterpunk, or you haven’t seen some of the more fucked-up horror movies, you may not be ready for this ride. I would have an easier time listing fucked-up things that DON’T happen in this story as opposed to the ones that DO.

Blood and gore? Piñata has that in spades.

Other bodily discharges? Loads of that.

Sexual deviance? Yep, that too.

Complete and utter madness? To the brim.

At this point, if you are the type of person that should be scared off, hopefully you are, but for the rest of you maniacs, let’s talk about Piñata.

First, I want to say, Favro uses a narrative device and a couple of opening lines that are identical to something from one of my own stories I wrote a while ago but have not published. The narrative device is that the entire story we are reading is the transcription of someone speaking into an audio cassette recorder. The opening lines being the speaker questioning whether the tape was rolling and then confirming they see it. Maybe this is common?

Next, I want to say that once Favro finishes setting up the premise, a doctor recounting what is set up as an awful true crime story that will read as a work of fiction, it doesn’t take long until the wheels start coming off (in a good way).

Even the premise is disorienting, right off the bat. I understand a doctor is recording himself, and Gayle is transcribing the tape into what we are reading before us. I get the main character is Marju, and the story aspect of what we are reading is happening in third person but damn near inside of her head.

What I am not following is who wrote this in the first place. Marju herself? In the third person? The doctor says that it is, “the story presented to me by both the investigating detectives, the attending police, witnesses and Marju herself.” So, am I to understand the doctor himself has fictionalized these events the best he can based on all these different testimonies? The lines are blurry.

Weirdly enough, this is maybe one of Piñata’s strengths. Its ability to disorient. The text reads like the erratic mind of a psychotic. The tense and subject switch fluidly in spots. Piñata has a plot, but it is sparse, consisting of mostly buildup to a chaotic and bloody conclusion. It is more a mood piece. The most vile and disturbing mood piece I’ve ever read, but a mood piece nonetheless.

It was around the middle when things started to become really chaotic and sort of hard to follow, when again I felt like Favro was doing something in a very similar way to how I had written a hallucinatory scene in one of my own stories. Just to be clear, my story is not published, and I am in no way implying any kind of theft, but this was the second time while reading Piñata where I felt a weird sense of connection to what was on the page.

The prose hypnotizes you with the internal chatter of a violent madwoman. Things start off bad, and they just keep getting worse. Then you think, “Well, there is no way Favro is going to top that,” but then he does. Piñata is a hard book to talk about because you can’t say much about where the book goes without getting censored to oblivion, but also, if you are looking to go into this to get shocked, I don’t really want to spoil anything for you.

I am going to give you with the most G rated version of the plot that I possibly can:

“A woman named Marju lives in an apartment complex with two kids and a naughty dog who won’t stop getting into the couch. Marju loves candies, jams, and jellies and playing with her kids. Marju feels she hasn’t made the best impression on her neighbors, even though she is always looking out for them. So, she decides to throw a party to get to know everybody much better. She planned lots of great games, and the party was such a success that people talked about it for years to come.”

It was at the end, during the party, when Marju did something with someone’s neck that I had my third experience while reading Piñata, where I got that weird déjà vu. Again, the scene was almost out of something I had written. Favro zigged where I zagged. I have concluded that we may have some sort of Bizarro Superman-style connection. I am going to have to keep my eye on this Favro fellow so he doesn’t come after me in some sort of Jet Li’s The One type scenario.

Piñata is a hallucinatory, hypnotizing, broken mess of disgust, viscera, and complete dissociated id. I have images in my head that are never going to go away because I read this book—specifically what Marju used to make a paper mâché-like binding agent. As disturbing as it was, I am probably going to read Piñata again.