Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Gerald's Game

“men were not so much gifted with penises as cursed with them”.

That’s it. That’s literally every. Single. Male. Character. In this book in a nutshell. They’re actually all so gross. Jesus Christ…

This was my first Steven King book!
Saw it was on Netflix, and I wanted to read the thing first.

Okay, let’s start out with what I liked:
As a mentally I’ll and traumatised bitch myself, who used to struggle with a psychosis, I both related and hated so many parts of this book. The way that Steven described the voices and the heart drops and the visions, it was all really well written, and they felt real. Kudos to King for that one.
And the whole solar eclipse situation. SO FREAKING GROSS, I was one step away from barfing, that was a horrible thing to read about, that was genuinely terrifying, again kudos to Steven for that.

Now onto the negative stuff.
The tone shift that happened from when we first see

the man in the corner

To the end where we get all of that explained was just so anti climatic. When the first situation happened, it was SO ABSOLUTELY FUCKING TERRIFYING JESUS CHRIST, It actually triggered my psychosis so I had to take a week break, and then when we got everything explained at the end, it just did not feel scary anymore. The reveal just felt a little bit too parody-ish or just way over the top,

(there was just too much penis on all of those pages)

, and it personally made the rest of the book fall flat for me after that.

AND AGAIN, male authors just really want an outlet for their women torture porn fantasies huh? So they decide to write books to get them out huh? The way that Steven King continued to talk about her body throughout the whole thing made me so uncomfortable. WE GET IT STEVEN, YOU LOVE THE CHERRIES, STOP IT😭

So yeah, wish I could give it more stars, but I cannot 💅
Also I have decided to adopt the poor doggie, do not worry guys, he’s having a great time with me, I’m giving him treats, he’s all happy and good.

Content Warnings

clapyourshands's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

bryds's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Content Warnings

gavinn_h's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

This book was an absolute beast of a story. I burned through this book so quickly and it was difficult to put down, yet I didn’t want to keep going it was so disturbing. I shaved off a few points due to the sheer amount of incest in this book. I think that this could serve as a legitimate plot point, but in the case of this book it seemed to be purely shock factor. Despite this, the story was extremely well written and very addictive.

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