A review by slothful_1592
The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy

4.5

“I may not have liked what he did but he made me feel alive, over-burdened with random meaning.” 

 

smutty, exciting, exhilarating, vulgar: loved it—a compulsive diary writer (Dodie Bellamy the author) bearing out, performing, nauseating herself & esp. her sex life, thru the detour of Mina Harker & the addressees, as it’s in epistolary form, about her life, marriage to Kevin Killian, relationships with a bunch of guys & friends—but really there’s no confessing or secrets or depth or psychologies to plumb and analyse, instead it is sheer writing & sex in excessive, surplus detail, what it is is precisely just that, and the conscious literary representation of that performance—a diary of her fucks, of her wanting to fuck, of the various ways, people, all mixed with horror movie images: divine! like watching an 80’s gore fest with a loquacious companion fantasisising herself into all the scenes, delirious & numbing at times tbh but i enjoyed the experience (favourites were whole passages on godzilla and argento films)—tho some of the letters are to Sam D’Allesandro who died of AIDS in the late 80’s and those letters sometimes, esp. toward the end became sad & poignant tho the irreverent verve of the prose was still there