A review by wardenred
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

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

3.5

Part of Paul would have been disappointed, even a little repelled, if Julian ever said outright that he loved him. It was  more natural for Julian to be loved than to love. If Julian were to love him, it would feel like something he deigned to do. It meant more to be needed.

Books like this tend to be my guilty pleasure: stories about bad people doing bad things for bad reasons, about toxic relationships presented exactly as such. I don't know what it is exactly what drawns me to such stories. Perhaps it's the safe way to explore the darkness. Perhaps it's the same thing that makes it hard for some people to avert their eyes from bloody accidents. 

Anyway, I was incredibly excited for this book because it promised from the start to be exactly that thing I'm after. And for a while, it had me hooked quite a bit. The prologue was intriguing. So were the budding stages of Paul and Julian's codependency. But the longer I read, the less immersion I'm sorry to say I felt. Paul and Julian both were just too pretentious and not complex enough for me; there was that illusion of complexity, but mostly, they were just made of flaws with no redeeming qualities. Like I said, I do sometimes love reading about awful characters with too many flaws, but what usually makes the experience meaningful to me is seeing glimpses of some could-have-beens here and there: moments that show me that the character could have been a better person if they didn't take this or that turn. Moments where I get to believe that maybe they can make a different, better choice, that show me they're capable of it, but still they choose to turn to the dark side. Moments that show me that they're human and hurting. This book... wasn't exactly empty of those moments, but whenever they happened, they fell flat for me.

I did appreciate a lot of things about this novel. The dark academia aesthetic, the way the tension was executed in some later parts, the depiction of both boys' families. The way it was Paul who turned out to be a bigger monster and not Julian, whereas usually it's the "new pretentious friend" in such book who turns out to be the worse bad guy, corrupting the "plain boy drifting through life." There were some really poignant depictions of anger and grief and the way they co-exist and feed on each other. There were plenty of clever turns of phrase. I suppose it's the characters' personalities mainly that didn't work for me, and unfortunately, that aspect, subjective as it may be, is what tends to make or break a book for me.
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