ashwednesday

I am of the opinion that any book that makes you think is a good book. Well half of a good book because if it makes you think of throwing yourself in front of a speeding vehicle well that's just different.

The last book I read before picking this up was a coming of age story told from a 14-year old boy's perspective. So of course I was going to read about how the world looks like through the eyes of a sexual predator who preys on 14-year old boys.

Because you know. Something something symmetry.

(That was purely coincidental by the way. I swear I am not as perverted as I seem, I just have a bad habit of not sticking to my monthly reading schedule.)

So this one made me brain. Lots. I brained about gender biases and how our preconceived notions have repeatedly screwed us over and yet we refuse to learn because the illusion is much too cushier. I brained about what becomes of boys like Boyd and Jack and how it would be a complete mind moral fuck if they ended up quite okay in the end. I brained if there's any really victim in this story, if any abuse really happened… except for Celeste's vagina which I really imagine was screaming for help. It's a wonder this woman isn't on perpetual prophylactic antibiotics because seriously, what that vagina suffers through in the day to day is a horror story on its own.

Yes we do need to see a clear illustration of a screaming vagina.

There was a lot of awkward, un-PC laughter on my part because Celeste was quite the storyteller and whenever she breaks into her strange, depraved reverie it's hard not to laugh at her fantasies even if you are, in essence, laughing at a mentally ill woman. If you ever wonder what monsters daydream of, well…

I imagined Jack's body made gigantic standing before me, the sun in the sky becoming the hot metal button of his jeans. If his enormous fingers reached down from the clouds and unbuttoned it, if his horizon-colored pants began to bunch and fall and his teenage sex of skyscraper proportions was freed, I would drive my car into his toe so he would kneel down to investigate and accidentally kill me when the sequoia sized head of his penis came crashing through my windshield, all in the hopes that the last image seen before death is the backdrop to our eternity.

It's always a disturbing, but no less fascinating, experience whenever we get a peek at what goes on in the perverted mind of someone who come across psychiatrically unsound Isn't there a rule somewhere that correlates the mental stability of the artist as inversely proportional to the value of his art?

Celeste's actions are truly deplorable, made more sinister by the premeditation of her actions and the execution of her plans to feed her hunger… and in a strange way, we are seeing her art. She is an artistic monster, one that chills your bone with how demented she sounds one moment and unintentionally rational in the next.

I knew if I ever had a son, at a certain age it would be impossible to ignore him, and I never wanted to force that transgression upon myself.

A silver lining in all that selfish intent, I guess.

She communicates the tangible desperation for something that is condemned by societal mores, how she blends in to camouflage her claws and fangs to get closer to her prize and her lack of any remorse over the collateral damage she incurs in satisfying that singular need. She has no redeeming quality, there's no sympathy to be given and she doesn't appeal for that up to the very end. This is seeing a monster that has fully adapted to survival.

With that big and compelling of a character, it's hard not to fall into the trap on letting all of Celeste's crazy do all the work and Tampa as a story did suffer a little from that. Some details this presented didn't make sense no matter how I looked at it (i.e. Why did she marry a cop?), some scenes were a little too heavy handed on the obvious (i.e. her classroom discussions) and her lack of a clear exit strategy and her erratic behavior towards the end felt contradictory for someone I was led to believe was calculatingly deviant and meticulous in her actions.

Someone missed a class in Villains University.

There was an odd lyricism in Celeste's voice and I was pleasantly surprised that the sex wasn't as graphic as I thought it would be. It was graphic in other areas, but not in the obvious. I was geared up to be squicked by her sexual encounters with Jack but it was how she sees him as something disposable, right from the very beginning that squicked me worse.

There was this scene towards the end that required her to act crazy and I thought that was brilliant. A crazy woman acting as if a sane person pretending to be crazy.

And I did kinda wish she didn't drop character until the DVD commentary so soon.

Despite the plot inconsistencies, I found the story was told in a focused manner with very little fanfare to distract me.

I'm not usually a fan of a standalone book's plot getting mangled, stretched and disfigured to fit and fill the pages of a trilogy but I can't deny that should this one pursue that option, of showing me what happened to Jack and Boyd, I probably would think twice.

Instead of thrice.