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effy 's review for:
Broken Dolls
by Mique Watson
Lauren lives a quiet idyllic life with her daughter, slowly healing from religious trauma and a bad marriage. Her peaceful gentle life is turned completely on its head when a pair of strangers arrive at her door, supposedly seeking assistance.
Let’s start with the content warnings for this book because they are all pretty extreme and intense. The biggest one is definitely paedophilia / sexual relationships between an adult and a child but we also have kink shaming (let me be clear, this is unrelated to the paedophilia but this book tries to conflate kink with paedophilia), necrophilia, extreme sexual content, rape, murder, torture, graphic injury detail, incest. Honestly, I feel as though I am missing things but the big thing to be aware is that a lot of this story revolves around children being forced to participate in sexual acts.
I picked this up because I am currently embarking on a challenge for myself where I read the worst books that my best friend read last year. Picking this book up was also largely driven by curiosity (and we all know that curiosity killed the cat) because this book is only 86 pages long and she could not finish it because it was so disgusting so I needed to know what was so terrible about this book. Well, this book was truly something.
Some very minor context, this is probably my first time reading a book that fits into the extreme horror genre. I have read books like Transmuted by Eve Harms and An Affinity for Formaldehyde by Chloe Spencer (both incredible books if you are looking for some grisly horror that doesn’t have paedophilic aspects and is a wee bit diverse too) but they practically feel like children’s picture books by comparison to Broken Dolls. I feel like this context is important because I don’t really have any frame of reference for the boundaries and limits - I am going to say there are none? - for this genre. I am planning to read a lot more extreme horror this year because I have been interested in trying it and do find that I gravitate more towards dark stories.
Clearly I have massive issues with the specific acts that our characters are forced to carry out in this book and I struggle to understand who the audience for this book is beyond nonces but maybe the whole point is to push the envelope as far as possible? If we divorce the book from how disgusting a lot of the content is, I still think that the book is very flawed. The writing, especially at the beginning of the book, was filled with purple prose and the only way that I can describe the style is like a vanity project self-published book; it was so deeply indulgent and reeked of feeling impressed with itself. Whilst I understand that the first few chapters were meant to make Lauren feel like a whole character and establish a contrast between the idyllic life at the start of the book and where events have taken us at the end of the book, a lot of these chapters felt wholly unnecessary, especially the attempted critiquing of purity culture - which definitely should be critiqued but needs a more skilful hand than Watson’s to do it well - and Lauren randomly decided she is going to lust after her neighbour who is twice her age. I almost felt like the first few chapters had me mentally tapping my foot impatiently waiting for the horror to kick in. Oh, you sweet summer child.
On the horror front, I feel like I need to once again say that it was completely disgusting and vomit-inducing and just a whole heap of nope. It was very fixated on anal penetration which seemed strange. Beyond how sickening the horror was, and not in the good way, the real issue that I had with this book was the fact that the horror did not scale: the acts started at a hundred so it felt like there was no real room for things to get worse. I mean, they kind of do but what you are really looking for is for the characters to feel terror and despair but feel as though if they can escape, they will be able to find a way to recover, somehow. The acts that the characters are forced to do needed to start on the tamer end of things so that you could root for the characters to survive but from pretty much the off, the reader immediately feel as though death is a mercy and that is what you are hoping for so anything beyond that just feels as though it is delaying the inevitable.
And yet after all of the things that I have written, I am kind of intrigued to read the sequel. Why? Well, I feel like starting my extreme horror journey with this book means that I am already drinking long vodkas at the bar in hell so I am not really sure how it could get any worse (probably jinxed myself and these will be famous last words) but I am also cautiously optimistic with a title like “Deliverance” that we will get some kind of redemption. I guess check back here to see if I do end-up picking that up but until then, I still have quite a few books to read that my friend despised last year!