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slettlune 's review for:
Necrophilia Variations
by Supervert
I realize I've put myself in a bit of a quandary wanting to criticise this book, because I can't escape the fact that I was the one who bought and read a book titled Necrophilia Variations written by an author calling themself Supervert.
But here's my take: I wanted to read this as a bit of a palate cleanser, I wanted to be shocked, I wanted to check this self-styled modern de Sade, and after reading a sample of the first story (a bold, cheerful defence of necrophilia as the only moral choice when it comes to handling human remains) I thought I knew exactly what I was in for. Well I wasn't. Despite its title and marketing, only a few of the myriad of stories touch on necrophilia. Most of them are about death, specifically the fear of dying, and every short story is written in the exact same voice. All the main characters blend together (cynical young men with a more or less open disregard of women), and the only thing that makes it an easy read is really how short every story is (a lot of them two or three pages), even if most of them don't seem to have any kind of conclusion. The sex, when it occurs, is written so primly and vaguely it feels like the screen fades to black the moment people start kissing. I expected something far more out there written by someone calling themself a portmanteau of super-pervert.
There's a marked lack of editing in this book. Too many extremely similar texts are ordered one after the other, a lot of them seem like notes or prompts the writer never got around to finishing, and one block of text (a fantasy about raping a woman waiting for medical attention after a traumatic event) shows up almost verbatim in two different short stories. By the time I reached the final text, which was this smug "gotcha" that you, morbid reader, will never regard death the same way after reading this book, I was well and truly exhausted.
Two stars because there were maybe a handful of stories that very darkly comedic and memorable.
But here's my take: I wanted to read this as a bit of a palate cleanser, I wanted to be shocked, I wanted to check this self-styled modern de Sade, and after reading a sample of the first story (a bold, cheerful defence of necrophilia as the only moral choice when it comes to handling human remains) I thought I knew exactly what I was in for. Well I wasn't. Despite its title and marketing, only a few of the myriad of stories touch on necrophilia. Most of them are about death, specifically the fear of dying, and every short story is written in the exact same voice. All the main characters blend together (cynical young men with a more or less open disregard of women), and the only thing that makes it an easy read is really how short every story is (a lot of them two or three pages), even if most of them don't seem to have any kind of conclusion. The sex, when it occurs, is written so primly and vaguely it feels like the screen fades to black the moment people start kissing. I expected something far more out there written by someone calling themself a portmanteau of super-pervert.
There's a marked lack of editing in this book. Too many extremely similar texts are ordered one after the other, a lot of them seem like notes or prompts the writer never got around to finishing, and one block of text (a fantasy about raping a woman waiting for medical attention after a traumatic event) shows up almost verbatim in two different short stories. By the time I reached the final text, which was this smug "gotcha" that you, morbid reader, will never regard death the same way after reading this book, I was well and truly exhausted.
Two stars because there were maybe a handful of stories that very darkly comedic and memorable.