Eat Them Alive/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Complete Monster: Dyke is a loathsome excuse for a human being. He lets his mantises eat the entire population of several villages, including the babies and children. Later, Dyke forces his former partners to watch their wives and kids (for whose lives they beg profusely) get gobbled up before they themselves get eaten. Just for kicks he even has the mantises eat their neighbors, who are entirely uninvolved.
  • Ethnic Scrappy: The Colombian natives, especially Keko. There's also a startlingly racist depiction in the Mexican farmhand that rescues Dyke after his beating.
  • Narm Charm: Dyke's relationship with Slayer, where he says things like, "Good boy, Slayer. You're the biggest of them all and the only one with a red head." His outright refusal to keep anything to himself and constantly talking aloud to no one is pretty amusing, too.
  • Squick: The whole book, but especially the aforementioned boob-ripping and baby-eating... and one scene wherein a woman is literally, uh "eaten out" by a mantis.
  • Villain Sue: A given, considering the entire novel is told from the point of view of the Villain Protagonist.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Dyke at first. Then he just goes too far and stops being even remotely pitiable.