By: Martha Rolfe

With Sexy Bloody Mess, author Dar Dowling delivers a novel that punches like a fist to the sternum and whispers to the throat: seductive, violent, chaotic, and tender. The book is a genre-bending collision of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, where love is love, power is unstable, and transformation demands blood.

It reads like John Wick meets The Punisher with a big splash of Suicide Girls — a cinematic fever dream stitched with neon thread.

The tale begins beneath the streets of New York City, in a sprawling, myth-eaten sewer world that thrums with ancient power. This realm is not merely underground; it is alive. It remembers everything society tries to bury — monsters, memories, identities too unruly for daylight. Rat-faced gargoyles leer in shadowed chambers, architecture bends toward the surreal, and the tunnels themselves seem to breathe.

Connor: A Man Reborn in Darkness

At the center stands Connor, once a cop, now something far stranger — a body remade by violence and fused with the undercity. His new form moves like liquid shadow, slipping through pipes and tunnels to strike with devastating precision.

He is not a hero; the book refuses to flatten him. Connor is rage sharpened into purpose as the story unfolds, guided less by nobility than by a bone-deep need to confront the world that destroyed him.

This ambiguity is Dowling’s hallmark — characters forged in trauma, still searching for connection and meaning amid the wreckage.

The Queer Trinity

Connor’s new life shifts when he crosses paths with Lady — wild, sensual, elemental — and Sheba, her lover, her fiery partner in crime, and equal in both ruthlessness and devotion. Together they form an unlikely alliance — loving, seductive, and narratively magnetic.

Their bond is unapologetically queer. Sheba and Lady share a dynamic that is intimate, timeless, passionate, and fiercely protective. Connor enters not as a disruptor but as someone who must find his way within their already-established relationship.

Rather than reducing queerness to ornamentation, Dowling enshrines it as a source of power, creativity, and survival. These three are drawn together by trauma, desire, and the need to build something resembling family — even as the world teeters on the brink of collapse.

Myth and Metaphor

Dowling’s subterranean world is both brutal and strangely beautiful. She describes her  narrative approach simply: “I have an idea, and I’m just going to see where it takes me.”

That instinctive creation produces a world with its own strange logic — a myth unfolding organically rather than dictated by formula. The sewers operate as a metaphor as much as a setting: a place where what society discards returns transformed.

It is here that forgotten things — bodies, memories, identities — learn to gather themselves and become powerful.

Above and Below

The story moves freely between the underworld and the New York City above. Connor, Sheba, and Lady move through both planes, their extraordinary abilities colliding with the everyday lives of the city’s inhabitants.

The result is a persistent tension — the familiar haunted by the impossible. Darkness presses upward. The city remains unaware, even as something ancient begins to stir beneath its feet.

Global catastrophe looms, but the novel’s stakes remain grounded in character, healing, love, and survival.

Love, Violence, and Chosen Family

Despite its brutality, Sexy Bloody Mess is unexpectedly tender. Beneath its snarling violence, sharp humor, and moral ambiguity lies a story about belonging: lovers found, families we lose, and the ones we dare to build from the wreckage.

“They have the family they were born with, which is not in the picture anymore for a variety of action-packed reasons,” Dowling explains. “But out of the grit, sorrow, and hope, they actually create a family—one that is growing along with the darkness they face on the horizon.”

This chosen family — queer, traumatized, fiercely loyal — becomes the heart of the novel.

The Antihero Reimagined

Connor, Sheba, and Lady retain their jagged edges. They do not soften to please the reader. Instead, they deepen. Connor transforms from a shattered instrument of revenge into someone capable of connection; Sheba’s instincts sharpen; Lady’s loyalty becomes both weapon and shield.

Dowling calls them “Dar-made hybrids” — creations who defy the familiar binaries of hero and villain. Their choices are unpredictable, which is precisely what makes them all the more compelling.

A Genre All Its Own

Sexy Bloody Mess is deliberately uncategorizable. It folds fantasy into sci-fi, threads horror through romance, and layers it all with queer sensuality and myth.

The narrative’s pulse shifts from brutal confrontation to intimate confession, from absurd humor to quiet sorrow. It is, as its title suggests, both bloody and messy — and deeply alive.

The Saga Begins

This novel is only the beginning. Sexy Bloody Mess launches a larger saga, one that could offer deeper explorations of the trio’s origins, the darkness stalking the world, and the emotional terrain that binds them. If the first book is any indication, what follows will be stranger, wilder, and even more brutally heartfelt.

Dive into the world of Sexy Bloody Mess and meet Connor, Sheba, and Lady as they fight, love, and transform in the shadows beneath New York City. Keep an eye out for the official release, coming just after Halloween, and be among the first to experience this ferocious new saga. 

Follow Dar Dowling on Instagram for exclusive updates and behind-the-scenes extras.