Stephanie Danler recently recommended this book, describing it as a “perfectly constructed, sexy, unnerving, uniquely NYC novel.” With that review, I had to pick it up quickly.
Synopsis: “By day, Frannie teaches her writing students about irony and language in all its nuance, eccentricity, and unspoken meaning. By night, she compiles a secret dictionary of street slang … and takes chances. One night in the basement of a bar she walks in on an intimate moment between a man and a woman. The man’s face is shadowed in the darkness, but she will forever remember the tattoo on the inside of his left wrist; the feeling of his eyes on her. She will remember long after the first brutal murder rocks her neighborhood … long after she is propelled into a sexual liaison that tests the limits of her safety and desires, as she begins a terrifying descent into the dark places that reside deep within her.”
An erotic thriller, this story drew me in, thoroughly freaked me out, and kept me reading until I finished. I read it one sitting and, by the end, couldn’t decide how I felt about it. The writing juxtaposes sexual explicitness with the brutal murders of multiple women, which results in an unsettling, eerie story that forms a pit in your stomach while reading that won’t relent until you know how it ends.
TW: use of the N word, racism, sexual violence, detailed descriptions of murder
Read It Like Rory 