Monster Love

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Once we’re free, she can have anything she wants from me so long as she doesn’t want me to let her go. It is the same frisson of pleasure that almost every queer female artist I know felt watching Cate Blanchett in “Tár. The first half was amazing - it was like Stephen King and Gillian Flynn had a baby, and every POV kept me glued to the page because it build an amazing tension.

There's even moments of terrible comedy, like when Sherilyn and Brendan say that they can't send their cat to somebody else, so they put him outside and "trust him to find another home" (they're leaving their daughter to starve in a cage, by the way). Apparently, I still can't and therefore have perhaps not grown out of that disturbing teenage phase, because I vaguely remembered this book and wondered what I'd think of it now, as I suspected my ambivalence came from a feeling of being totally horrified by the language/violence/sex, as those were the main things I remembered. Not an enjoyable book as such, it tells the story of a strange couple whose creepy, obsessive relationship feels threatened by the arrival of their unwanted baby and then the disturbing events that follow. That's without even getting into the descriptions of rape/molestation we get - unnecessarily - from James's POV. The book switches constantly to hear other character's points of view but I kept having to go back to remember who they were.

This is no suspense novel; from the first chapter on, we can easily guess that something unspeakably horrible happened to poor little Samantha. because when I asked them if I could see Samantha, just for the record, she said she was playing at the rec with her friends and I just went Oh, OK' Kaye, social worker 'You see it all the time in videos and that, but until you're in the room with them you don't really know what it means' Sharon, juror No one in the neighbourhood has seen the Gutteridges' little girl Samantha for months.

Then - we start to get into the realms of the unbelievable with the weird psychic relationship and I lost interest rather.

Had I read this book a couple of years ago, it may not have gripped me the way it did but now, having had a baby, it horrified me.