Muscle Man
A single day inside the mind of an embittered academic reveals how bodily obsession and grievance fuse into a closed circuit of paranoia, performance and self-surveillance.
272 pages · Kindle & audio edition · September 2025
A Bro Lost in a Trenbolone Fever Dream
An alienated English professor’s obsessive interiority drives this claustrophobic portrait of grievance, ego and bodily fixation over a single day.
Muscle Man traps the reader inside the skull of a man convinced the world is conspiring against him. The novel moves through hunger, paranoia, gym euphoria and self-inflicted humiliation, all filtered through a voice that never loosens its grip.
The lifting scenes are vivid. Jordan Castro understands the ritual and obsession of the gym. The physical details land cleanly. The academic resentment has bite, and the breakdown is sometimes funny in a bleak, unflattering way. The problem is duration. The inner monologue never opens outward. It is claustrophobic by design and stays that way, offering little beyond the narrator’s fumes.
There are moments where the psychology sharpens. The failed 505 lift, the sauna embarrassment, the collapse of trust around Casey. These scenes briefly anchor the book in something recognisable. But everything remains mediated through a narrator who cannot be trusted and is difficult to care about. Insight flickers, then gets swallowed by repetition.
The concept is solid and the atmosphere convincing. The execution feels too enclosed. The novel stays so tightly bound to its own voice that it never finds a way to move past it.
Advance copy provided by NetGalley and Brilliance Publishing.