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Book Review: Beyond Hate - Lee McCormick
Jul. 17th, 2025 02:10 pm
London doesn’t want to die. So it’s a good thing that Otto doesn’t plan on killing him— yet.
Thrown from one awful situation into another, London is taken from the frypan into the fire, and then dumped into a bucket of ice for good measure. Along the way he discovers: kinks, Stockholm Syndrome, arterial bleeding, a switchblade knife, what Otto looks like when feral and when tame.
Otto meanwhile discovers: what it feels like to be the big spoon, incandescent and possessive rage, how hot London looks with blood on him, and that sometimes it’s better to let go of the past instead. It just takes several corpses to get there.
We as the readers get to know some of the answers Otto is hunting, so that’s a satisfying bit to munch on. Lee ties the past and the future very nicely together, with no dropped threads or overly large plotholes. This book could also technically be read as a stand-alone, since it only very briefly touches on the events in Beyond Reason and doesn’t need much, if any, knowledge of the rest of the series to make sense.
You know that trope “I can fix him”? Yeah, that’s not this book. “I can make him worse” is much more appropriate; Otto is a live cannon who just needs a direction to shoot, and if he wants London to do the shooting, well, London wants him to break his ribs open and eat him alive, so they work out well together. 10/10.
(Otto is so hot, I want to run my hands through his hair.)
