The Bug Collector

I vividly remember sitting in a dimly lit classroom during middle school, forced to endure the infamous sexual education films that were supposed to teach us the facts of life. Instead, they often left us terrified, squirming in our seats, and repulsed by the clinical depictions of sexually transmitted diseases.

The close-ups of lesions and sores, the sterile narration about genital warts, and the mechanical explanations of transmission were enough to make anyone develop a lifelong fear of contracting an STD. The experience was nothing short of traumatic. It planted a deep-seated aversion to the very idea of diseases associated with sex, something I can’t shake even as an adult.

That visceral reaction is one I carried into Wrath James White’s The Bug Collector, a book that takes the fear of STDs and magnifies it to an unimaginable, grotesque extreme. White’s protagonist, Joey, doesn’t just fear sexually transmitted infections; he collects them. Joey’s fetish—a dangerous paraphilia—drives him to deliberately infect himself with every STD he can get his hands on, treating them like a gruesome set of trophies. For someone like me, who has spent their life anxiously avoiding these diseases, this premise is incomprehensible, both fascinating and deeply revolting.

The Bug Collector is not for the faint of heart. White’s prose is unapologetically brutal, his depiction of Joey’s descent into physical and mental ruin disturbingly graphic. The very nature of Joey’s fetish makes for a profoundly uncomfortable reading experience. White doesn’t shy away from grotesque descriptions of the damage Joey’s ‘hobby’ has inflicted on his body: his once handsome face is now ravaged, his health destroyed, and his life a husk of what it once was. This self-imposed destruction mirrors the grotesque fascination Joey has with his collection, as he transforms into something less than human, warped by his obsession.

The horror in The Bug Collector is amplified when Joey crosses paths with a woman even more dangerous and deranged than he is. What begins as a twisted tale of one man’s obsession spirals into a revenge plot that escalates well beyond the extreme. This woman, harboring a vendetta, traps Joey in a nightmarish scenario that pushes his paraphilia to its ultimate breaking point. White is a master at blending body horror with psychological terror, and in this novel, the violence is not only physical but mental. The way he depicts revenge is extreme and unrelenting, testing the reader’s limits with every page.

While the graphic content and disturbing themes may alienate some readers, seasoned fans of extreme horror will recognize Wrath James White’s talent for pushing boundaries. The novel is uncomfortable, grotesque, and extreme in every sense, from the subject matter to the violence, but it never feels gratuitous for the sake of shock alone. Instead, White uses these elements to explore themes of self-destruction, obsession, and revenge in a way that lingers long after you’ve finished reading.

As someone who has long feared the very things Joey actively seeks out, I found The Bug Collector to be a perplexing and unsettling read. White forces the reader to confront their own anxieties and discomforts while weaving a tale of horror that is as introspective as it is gruesome. The book may be impossible to fully understand for those of us who can’t fathom such a fetish, but in White’s hands, it becomes a dark, twisted exploration of humanity’s most self-destructive urges.