Garth Greenwell

Tedious. Almost all of the characters in this anthology are miserable or unlikable, which really only serves to give kink a bad name.

Suffers from the same self-aggrandising introspective misery-porn levels of wank that a lot of ‘erotic literature’ does. But with the added bonus of outright rape scenes (no, not ‘consensual non consent’ or ‘dubious consent’ we’re talking grimdark torture and rape followed by crying and trauma. Happy kink anthology!)

You’ll get more thoughtful kink on AO3 for free. It’s almost like most of the authors took this as a challenge to misrepresent the subject and write a world where most people don’t enjoy kink, or may even be rapists if they do. Wouldn’t recommend this to a single person in the scene. Or anyone else for that matter.… (altro)

This book transcends a rather tired premise and a shaky beginning to become a very rewarding read. At the beginning I had a very definite sense that while the setting and the desire were very real, the business of paying for sex in a public toilet and the resulting emotional complications were somewhat confected. As a gay man I have certainly imagined what it would be like to pay for sex with a breathtakingly sexy hustler, but I have also imagined what it would be like to have a sublime singing voice or to buy an aircraft carrier and sail it around the world - that doesn't mean I should write a book about it.

However, as this initiating event fell further into the past, the book felt more real to me. There is plenty of emotional truth to be had in the narrator's reflections on his earlier life, and particularly in his struggles to find meaning in his adult life and his guilty suspicion that by living in Europe he might be running away from something. The theme of desire, which runs throughout the novel, is developed very well.

The writing is somewhat patchy, with mostly very evocative, powerful writing interspersed with rather clunky lines and a self-consciously literary style which I found distracting. The very long paragraph I found particularly distracting, because it wasn't actually one paragraph but just a bunch of consecutive paragraphs with the line breaks and indentation removed, so I didn't read it all in one sitting, but actually stopped at an obvious paragraph end (when he came back to the present momentarily from his reminiscence) and did something else before coming back to it.

Nevertheless, I found this a very enjoyable read and although it is less than 200 pages, it can be read quite slowly and really savoured.… (altro)