The Exodontists by Drew Huff
Genres: Adult, Horror
Representation: Asexual sexless but not genderless monster MCs, hispanic MC, big queer themes
PoV: Third-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 13th October 2026
ISBN: 1068314168
Goodreads
The Exodontists dream of bleach and teeth...
In this darkly macabre Halloween horror novel, the Exodontists--a family of tooth-loving immortal monsters--must fight to keep their home after Spirit Halloween takes over the abandoned warehouse they live in.
Worse, still: The warehouse isn't only their home. It's also where they've run a free dental clinic for the last few decades, serving the needy and providing goodness for the human town they dwell in.
But trying to share the warehouse with the Halloween store ends up culminating in an epic grudge match to the death after the Exodontists unwittingly attract the attention of Garrett, a nasty incel employee of the Halloween store.
And things get violent.
Emotional. Dramatic. And oh-so exciting.
PLEASE READ AND RESPECT THE CONTENT WARNINGS LOCATED AT THE START OF THE BOOK.
THIS NOVEL IS A WORK OF HORROR MEANT FOR GROWN ADULTS AND FEATURES CONTENT THAT MANY READERS MAY FIND DISTURBING.
Highlights
~teeeeeeeeeeeeth!
~so much gender-fuckery
~families take many forms, okay
~the invasion of the seasonal Halloween store
~COME TO THE SLEEP-PILE
This is an extremely bonkers book, and I loved it! I think long-time Huff fans will be very happy, and if you haven’t read this author before, this is a great one to start with! As with other Huff books I’ve read, the prose is great, extremely readable but also punchy – by which I mean, I was constantly having the breath knocked out of me by incredible lines, or sometimes even single word choices! Huff’s imagination is a wild and darkly wondrous thing, but also he’s so freaking clever as a storyteller, as a writer. His use of language looks simple until it isn’t, his horror looks ‘just’ scary until you think about it even the littlest bit, and then you realise that Huff is playing, and storytelling, on multiple levels and all the levels rock!
The book description is a little misleading: The Exodontists isn’t really about the Exodontists ‘fighting for their home’ in the way you’d probably expect – there’s no battling with corporate, no trying to make the Halloween store leave, nothing like that. It’s more about…well, a whole bunch of worsening situations snapping all at once! (And then exploding. Naturally.)
So: wtf is an Exodontist? Very simply, they’re humanoids with no body hair, fingers that can change shape in a bunch of creepy ways, and no teeth of their own. They don’t have sexes, though they do use gendered pronouns. They ‘molt’ – shed their skins – at least once a day. Holy water has no effect on them – in fact, they’re pretty indestructible.
He raises his arms, and their embedded bullets gleam like gems.
And they’re utterly obsessed with teeth. They decorate their home with them. They use them for divination. They always want more. The teeth are not just an interesting detail: as the book goes on, we learn more and more about what the Exodontists use teeth for, and it just gets weirder and creepier (and thus, more delightful) chapter by chapter. The best is saved for last: in the final pages, we learn one more supernatural thing the Exodontists can do with teeth, and to me it was the weirdest of all. I APPROVE IMMENSELY.
Strings of teeth garland the rusted walls like Christmas popcorn strings.
Huffs does an incredible job at walking a thin line between making the Exodontists alien and creepy, and weirdly loveable. They have a sleep-pile, a kind of giant nest made out of their molted skins – and it’s not gross, because their shed skins are lovely and silky and very insulating. They even smell nice! Quite a lot of the details about the Exodontists are like that: they make you reflexively flinch or go ick!, but then become disturbingly sweet. On the other hand, lots of the details are straight-up and unashamedly alien, and the mix is excellent. (I want to talk about their biology SO BAD, but I think you’ll have more fun if you go in blind.)
A huge part of the creepy-but-loveable aspect comes from the characters of the Exodontists: Red, the leader, who Knows All (or needs everyone to think he does, anyway); Woman; Man; and Boy, who both is and is not a young kid. They all have distinct personalities, and they are all deeply creepy-but-loveable; by the end of the book I loved all four of them with my whole entire heart. WE STAN EXODONTISTS IN THIS HOUSE!
As does a large chunk of the human community around the Exodontists, because as it says on the back of the book, the Exodontists provide free dental care! To anyone and everyone! And they’re really good at it! You can imagine how this is a net good for a tiny middle-of-nowhere town somewhere in the US. Which is why people like Juan help out the Exodontists here and there – providing the occasional car ride, or therapy (!!!), or tipping them off to their warehouse being invaded by a seasonal Halloween store.
Everyone groans. Oh, good god, not the Talking Stone. They haven’t had to use it in years. It’s a helpful trick they learned from a former client: a marriage counsellor.
(I’m sorry, I’m still not over the TEETH-HUNTING MONSTERS IN THE ABANDONED WAREHOUSE knowing – and using! – therapy techniques for healthy discussion. DID I MENTION THAT I LOVE THE EXODONTISTS??? SO MUCH???)
In fact, Juan is one of our POV characters, along with Red, Faith – a young single mother on the run from the Christian cult she was raised in – and Garrett, a deeply pathetic scumbag incel. Each of the humans have their own incredibly tense plotlines running alongside the Exodontists – Juan’s wife is dying of cancer; Faith has just been tracked down by the man who raped and impregnated her, and he wants her to give up their daughter so he and his wife can adopt her; Garrett has committed a crime that requires a whole bunch more crimes to cover up. The clock is ticking for all of them, so loudly you can hear the second hand moving, tick-tick-tick with every line you read.
God-all-fucking-mighty here is yet another FUCKING MAN I have to appease before he kills me-–
Honestly, the most horrifying part of The Exodontists for me was being in Garrett’s head. URGH. Good gods, I wanted someone to kill him! He’s incredibly gross, incredibly misogynistic, unbelievably hateful. And deeply depressed, though he doesn’t realise it; I would have some sympathy for his depression, if he didn’t take his belief that ‘nothing matters’ as an excuse to be vicious, and violent, and an all-round horrific human being.
But Garrett’s inclusion is far from shock-factor material. Huff is playing with all things gender and sexuality from the opening page, and Garrett’s misogyny is a vital part of that. His and Faith’s interactions are a nauseatingly potent snapshot of toxic masculinity and patriarchal bullshit, and that is contrasted against the completely sexless Exodontists. It’s difficult to talk about without spoilers, but the Exodontists…Huff uses them as a stake through the heart of The Patriarchy, a kind of demonstration underscoring how stupid and pointless and illogical the human gender binary is – and even moreso, how stupid and pointless and illogical white Western gender roles are. There’s a scene where someone tries to make out with an Exodontist, and, just…I can’t even BEGIN to number the layers and layers of fuckery but also symbolism in that scene! There’s also plenty of body horror in relation to gender/sex, which delighted my freaky nonbinary self immensely, ESPECIALLY when it intersected with (and soundly kicked the ass of) incel bullshit.
Garrett and Faith’s arcs are the most obvious examples of all of this. Again, I don’t want to spoil(er?) anyone, so being as vague as possible: Faith’s arc in this is absolutely glorious, how she goes from the raging resentment and terror of a woman stepping around the potential violence of men to…not that, is simply MAGNIFICENT. Once I realised where Huff was going with Faith, she became one of my favourites. I cannot express how extremely validating it was on a nonbinary level, too; it’s very easy to read this entire book as a manifesto on ‘power/freedom/LOVE comes from discarding gender, actually’, which, you know. Is obviously lovely for me personally!
Whereas Garrett’s arc is so much messier, all tangled up; there are reasons to be sympathetic towards him, even as he does the most outrageous awful stuff, and that makes for a much stronger book, doesn’t it? I prefer villains who are complicated, whose situations are complicated, and Garrett’s is. You can understand him even as you despise him, and I find that very satisfying. Just as complicated is any potential interpretation of his arc – you can read his ending as a hellish punishment or a fairytale happy ending, both are equally true and correct, and I love that SO MUCH.
Juan’s plotline has a lot less to do with gendery stuff, and more with…can I call it mundane horror? By which I don’t mean boring, I mean everyday, normalised, normal-person horror. Juan’s arc is painful and tragic and deeply horrifying on so many levels, and again, you can read his ending as nightmarish or candy-floss sweet. I wanted to throw up, and I wanted to cheer, simultaneously. HOW DOES HUFF DO THAT?
You cannot communicate Kill me via blinking, though many invalids have tried.
The way all of these plotlines intersect and entwine!!! And I haven’t even mentioned the Exodontist drama, what it is that Red’s so afraid of, what he’s hiding, what he did, and all the mind-fuckery that is Boy, who is 7 but also 30 but not in the same way that Claudia in Interview With the Vampire is (which is to say, Claudia’s mind was an adult’s in a kid’s body, and BOY’S SITUATION IS WEIRDER AND MORE COMPLICATED, OKAY?)
And all of this is woven through with themes of love and family and community and personhood, and how warped all those things can be. In many ways, the little clan of Exodontists are the healthiest, most loving family in the book, and that is so messed-up and it delights me utterly! There’s so much – gleeful dissection of how awful humans can be, how toxic small towns can be, and so the ideal is to not be human at all! How hilariously brilliant is that?
Like. The Exodontists is just so much FUN. And you don’t have to read a lot into it; if you’d rather read ‘brain off’, you can ‘just’ enjoy it for the deeply weird weirdness, the alien biology, all the bits and pieces that are going to make so many people squirm uncomfortably. It can be surface-level horror, if you want. But if you do like thinking about what you’re reading, then my gods, Huff has laid out a feast for you!
Even ‘just’ as surface-level horror, I adore everything about this story. The transformations! The loss of humanity! The sudden genre-shift about halfway through! The lore! Man calling Red out on his ‘Lestat bullshit’! Marvellous, 10/10, I saw none of it coming and loved ALL OF IT! Expect it on my Best of Year list in December.
Perfect. No notes. My new favourite horror!
Trigger warnings: View Spoiler »
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