Take a photo of a barcode or cover
dark
emotional
medium-paced
I’ve let this thing that happened to me become me. I’m a thing, a commodity, a moral event.
I’d hoped there’d be more vampirism but there’s monsterfuckery at least. Intriguing assembly of fetishism, sadism, and consumption – that is, reality TV.
Of course, this being written in the 1960s, it is coloured by assumptions and biases typical of the age. The sexism becomes apparent when we compare and contrast the experiments conducted on Minner (an adult kidnapped and mutilated, his body altered and optimised, disrupting his self/image and causing him to become monstrous) with those conducted on Lona (a teen coerced into participation, her body left intact (the doctors emphasise her virginity – or maybe they emphasise it to deny violation), disrupting her (presumed natural) status as a mother and causing her to become hysterical). It’s worth noting egg donation and IVF may have been regarded as obscene in the 60s (when they existed solely in the realm of science fiction) but they’re now commonplace and from my perspective reading this book in the 2020s, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal besides the dubious consent. The centuplets are not Lona's children in any meaningful way and they are not siblings to one another in any meaningful way either. It still works for her to be depressed and disturbed and fixated on finding and raising one of those babies (maybe as a way to reclaim some control? or simply to play out a maternal role she feels she ought to?), but to me it just doesn’t read as a logical consequence of the experiment she was a part of.
There’s so much resentment and spite in this novel. Even the ending which has Chalk defeated by the power of love comes about bitterly. Minner and Lona’s relationship is fucked up but that’s kind of the point. It’s meant to be scandalous and doomed to fail. So turning that around through sheer force of will, and in doing so beating the villain at his own game... idk it kind of works, but I still think it’s a little weak. Too neat, maybe.
Not sure what to make of this novel. It’s an interesting one.