HOBBIES OVER COFFEE

Having been stung by wasps in the past, and the trauma of the movie My Girl forever scarring me, I was looking forward to this horror story. Especially when the book is described as “Jaws with wasps” so I did not hesitate to pick this up. 

Title : Meat Bees
Author : Dane Erbach
Genre: Horror | Mystery & Thrillers | New Adult
Pages: 284
Own/Borrowed/ARC:  eARC
Publication Date: Aug 04 2026

Jaws with wasps.

By the time Scarlett Sutton arrives at her dad’s cabin in the Smoky Mountains, two locals have already been eaten alive by wasps. Of course, she doesn’t know this yet. All Scarlett knows is her mom finally checked herself into a hospital to take care of her mental health, leaving Scarlett alone with her dad all summer.

After he insists that she get a job, Scarlett accepts a position at nearby Stovetop Outfitters, hoping to spend as much time away from him as possible. She doesn’t expect to trip over a skeletonized corpse beneath the zip-line during one of her shifts—and definitely doesn’t expect to be thrown into a Netflix-style true crime investigation.

The local sheriff’s department is so overwhelmed by these unsolved deaths that when one of the Stovetop Outfitters employees disappears next, Scarlett and her co-workers set out to find him on their own. They discover something much more horrifying: a swarm of yellow jackets stripping the meat off his body. Scarlett never signed up to solve a disgusting mystery, but in order to protect her friends and family, she must defeat the mountain’s darkness and all these godforsaken wasps.

Trigger warning (this is in no way a full list of triggers just the ones I can remember) : death, death by insects, misogyny, bee stings, 

Let’s start with what I enjoyed about this story.

I had never read a horror story that utilized wasps as the ones portraying the horror/murder. It was such a clever thought seeing as yellowjacket wasps are indeed carnivores and it wouldn’t be far off for a swarm to come together and begin to eat meat off a human. The chapters that show things from the point of view of the wasps and their involuntary involvement, their actions portray them in such a manner that was empathetic to their plight. Becoming workers in a design that they had no want or say in. It was interesting to see. 

Unfortunately, that’s where my praise for this story ends. There was a lot of potential in it but it became a confusing mess. 

The relationships it tries to build just fall short of the impact it’s trying to make. Scarlet’s mother’s characterization left a sour taste in my mouth. Scarlet refers to her mother the way others do by calling her Ashtray. A name that she was given during her “slut era” and she had been a groupie in her younger age. It seems so strange that everyone, including her own daughter would call her this. It just didn’t feel real to me. There was an underlying emotional story that I was hopeful would go somewhere, especially seeing as there was a point made that her mother seemed to be dealing with a mental issue, was getting help for it and Scarlet was faced with the fact that they have a codependent – and a rather toxic one – relationship. Scarlet often becomes the mother for her own mom and does whatever she wants, but when she is confronted with her dad, who acts like a dad, she pushes him away. I wanted more from their relationship. The moments that Scarlet becomes introspective about her relationships were good but went nowhere. At the end I there was a glimmer of hope that maybe Scarlet matured and grew from this whole ordeal, but nope! Not at all. 

Then there are the descriptions. Some lines would describe something as dull but then sharp at the same time in the same sentence that just didn’t flow or make the point it was trying to make. There’s a character that is being introduced as eighteen and a manager of the store that Scarlet applies to, but then describes her as if she’s an eight year old. 

My biggest gripe with it is that it is heavily underedited. There are a lot of typos, grammar errors, text messages that are not distinct from the rest of the writing so that you don’t know where the message ends. A lot of descriptions that just did not make sense. And then there were all the errors. There was a character called Liv, being called Liz. There was another time where a father was murdered but then the report says a mother was murdered. It was small things that add up to a lot in the end.

I think the biggest one is that by the end of the book you find out that it uses the ancient Indian land troupe. It was rushed, it went nowhere and characters were having dreams about being a dog and an indigenous person that originally came across the terror in the past. It was a rushed mess that made no sense and a troupe that made no sense or should have been utilized to begin with. Why, in 2026, are we still using this troupe!!??!

The story had great potential but it’s rushed, has too many references to social media ( brings up tiktok, snapchat, etc. so much ) and characters that don’t feel real at all. It also repeats itself a great deal that I sometimes felt like I had been reading a page that I already read before.

Thank you again to Netgalley, Dane Erbach and CLASH Books for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Let’s keep the conversation going below! Do you think you’ll be picking this book up? Have another novel that sounds like this and you recommend I pick up?