Steven LaChance Blog

(Thank you Morgan Ellis for providing this insightful literary critique of Gorilla.)

Gorilla by Steven LaChance: A Necessary Nightmare
Review by Morgan Ellis

A gospel of madness. A symphony of dread. A monster built from truth.

Steven LaChance’s Gorilla is a blistering descent into the darkest corners of power, identity, and engineered chaos. It’s a supernatural thriller rooted in horrifying plausibility, fusing real-world conspiracies, experimental drugs, religious extremism, and queer survival into a raw, relentless narrative. This is not horror for escapism. This is horror as indictment.

At its heart, Gorilla asks a terrifying question:
What if the monsters are the ones we trusted most?

Blending the legacy of MK-Ultra with a modern queer apocalypse, LaChance crafts a world where a synthetic drug called G4RLA-40 turns innocent people into violent vessels, and where a far-right religious leader believes it’s all God’s plan. The book opens with a literal monster—part man, part gorilla, entirely rage—and the violence only intensifies as the story unspools. From St. Louis nightclubs to clandestine pharmaceutical labs, the lines between experiment and execution blur until society itself begins to fracture.

But this isn’t just shock and blood. The novel beats with a human heart. LaChance gives us queer characters who are vivid, messy, and real—men and women trying to find love, trust, and meaning in a collapsing world. From Charlie and Bradley’s nightclub tragedy to Detective Vincent Rossi’s spiral into truth, the characters ground the story in emotional urgency.

Gorilla is cinematic in scope, brutal in honesty, and beautifully queer in its defiance. It’s a mirror held up to our worst instincts: government overreach, blind faith, hatred disguised as righteousness—and dares us to keep looking.

If Glow revealed the cracks in the world, Gorilla shatters the foundation.
This is horror that hits like prophecy.
A necessary nightmare. A damnation with purpose.