![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am not recommending the book. I picked it up in the bookstore because the cover, the title, and most especially the blurb on the back suggested it was one of those angsty rent-boy-hits-bottom-and has-a-revelation-that-may-or-may-not-save-him, the kind with the sort of equivocal ending and a fair bit of humor and poetry in it. It was also epistolary, I gathered, told through the pages of a website dedicated to johns evaluating hustlers.
This is not what the book was. It was an entirely different subgenre of the modern gay novel, one which I had thought had died out: it's the one that's about predators who coldly destroy helpless people, and by destroy I mean physically and completely and horribly. I want to vent here, but I don't want to inflict on you, may dear virtual friends, the images I witnessed, the words that I read.
Now, I know, and you probably know by now, that I have laughably insufficient protection against the depiction of cruelty. Usually I can handle it in writing better than in movies. But this. After the first couple of entries I skipped a little to see which way the story was going. Then I skipped a lot to see if it really was going that way. I read a bit before the end and I was ready to vomit.
I'm not condemning the book. He's on to something. I think he's depicting the conversation among sociopaths fairly accurately. And the fictional website owner keeps intervening, mildly, to say he doesn't think any of what's going on is true and people should be wary of calling the phone numbers the anonymous torturers are leaving for the victim. The point of the book is, I think, the abdication of responsibility on the part of the website owner. I only think so because I couldn't read the book.
The cover material in no way lead me to suspect what was inside. Was this lack of courage on the part of the publisher? Or was it a ploy, thinking that the people who would pick up the book actually knowing what was in it would tend to be people who would get off on the horrors in there and not people who would get involved in the moral issues around the website in the story?
I just don't know. And I don't know whether I approve of the book.
This is not what the book was. It was an entirely different subgenre of the modern gay novel, one which I had thought had died out: it's the one that's about predators who coldly destroy helpless people, and by destroy I mean physically and completely and horribly. I want to vent here, but I don't want to inflict on you, may dear virtual friends, the images I witnessed, the words that I read.
Now, I know, and you probably know by now, that I have laughably insufficient protection against the depiction of cruelty. Usually I can handle it in writing better than in movies. But this. After the first couple of entries I skipped a little to see which way the story was going. Then I skipped a lot to see if it really was going that way. I read a bit before the end and I was ready to vomit.
I'm not condemning the book. He's on to something. I think he's depicting the conversation among sociopaths fairly accurately. And the fictional website owner keeps intervening, mildly, to say he doesn't think any of what's going on is true and people should be wary of calling the phone numbers the anonymous torturers are leaving for the victim. The point of the book is, I think, the abdication of responsibility on the part of the website owner. I only think so because I couldn't read the book.
The cover material in no way lead me to suspect what was inside. Was this lack of courage on the part of the publisher? Or was it a ploy, thinking that the people who would pick up the book actually knowing what was in it would tend to be people who would get off on the horrors in there and not people who would get involved in the moral issues around the website in the story?
I just don't know. And I don't know whether I approve of the book.
Tags: