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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The cruelest poetry--and a blast to read, May 27, 2007
This review is from: Cruel Poetry (Paperback)
Vicki Hendrick's latest, Cruel Poetry, is a surrealistic noirish journey through the seediest sections of Miami's South Beach and an exploration into the destructive nature that artists/writers face. Renata is the ultimate femme fatale--beautiful, oozing sexuality, and in her own way a force of nature every bit as dangerous as one of the hurricanes that blow through South Florida. Emotionally unavailable, she lives for kicks and sensual pleasure. Jules is a struggling novelist desperate to write a book and hoping to finally win her father's approval. Sexually repressed, she latches onto Renata for inspiration, living next to Renata in the same seedy South Beach Hotel so she can listen in through a hole in the wall to Renata's sexual escapades with both her boyfriend and customers. Renata knows about this and encourages it, glad in her own way to be able to help the creative process. Richard, a poet and professor at a local University, has become one of Renata's regulars. He has also latched onto Renata, desperate for the inspiration he believes her beauty and sensuality can give him to create again. Both Richard and Jules are caught in a downward spiral, both making one mistake after the next. Both are stifled creatively, both are seeking Renata as their muse and cure, and both are stripped bare at the end, literally and figuratively, by their compulsive need to create.
Hendricks pulls no punches--with the sex and the noirish descent these character fall into. Dreamlike, thematically rich, this is the real deal. Noir at it's best. So whether it's that you like your crime fiction populated by dark, twisted souls on a one-way ticket to hell, that you're looking for something out of the norm that's beautifully written, or you just want to read one of the best crime novels out this year, I highly recommend Cruel Poetry.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Queen is back!, May 26, 2007
This review is from: Cruel Poetry (Paperback)
Renata is an empirical existentialist with a perfect ten body. She lives for pleasure full throttle and makes no excuses; she hooks for a living because it fits.
Richard is a poet, professor, husband and father obsessively in love with the above mentioned hooker. He's lost in his job, his marriage, his creativity and his quest for Renata's love. His attempts at coexistence with a normal life are spiraling out of control.
Julie is an aspiring writer paralyzed by insecurity and fear. Her need to prove herself with a tome worthy of daddy's praise places her in the path of a hurricane (both figuratively and literally). She's not quite sure if she's a lesbian or just another victim of love (love for Renata).
Francisco is also a hooker (the male version) and a small time drug dealer; a Florida version of a knockaround guy minus the traditional mob, although he does have business associates who make being around him dangerous. He's also Renata's lover of choice (as in she doesn't charge him), but is street savvy enough to understand the term "lover" as it applies to those who can't love; he's a convenience much the same way his job is a convenience to those requiring his services.
Pepe is a baby four foot python ... enough said.
Fans of Hendricks' special brand of noir erotica have been waiting five years for her latest sizzler and they'll be more than happy with Cruel Poetry. Spot on dialogue and an ability to absorb readers into her characters' dark worlds (worlds we can all relate to--whether they are dominated by obsession, jealousy, a failed marriage, a walk on the wild side, snakes or just an overwhelming need to feel complete) place Hendricks' noir at the forefront of the genre.
The poet's insatiable desire for Renata to love him has made a mess of his life. How his world comes apart piece by piece is fascinating and all too real. The good girl playing with dangerous people faces frightening consequences she can't imagine. Renata's emotional bond with Pepe (the cobra) reminds one of another of Hendrick's noir tales, Iguana Love. Renata can't feel love for people the way she can respect a snake (Pepe is genuine). Although she cares for people (Julie, Francisco and to some extent, even Richard), it will take a hurricane and a neatly wrapped surprise ending before she ever gets the chance to feel what everyone else around her seem so constrained by.
Vickie Hendricks remains the first Queen of Noir. Her much anticipated latest, Cruel Poetry, will draw you in with visceral, erotic and psychological obsessions. The ending will rock your world. Long live the Queen.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book sizzles, May 25, 2007
This review is from: Cruel Poetry (Paperback)
Elvis may have left the building, but "the Queen of Florida noir erotica," is standing solid at center stage. Like the King, her performance sizzles from start to finish. Cruel Poetry, the long-awaited fifth novel of Vicki Hendricks, is a hunk of burning love, lust, passion, obsession, sexuality (perverse and otherwise), betrayal, and murder that builds to such a fever pitch as it reaches its cataclysmic ending, that you can't turn the pages fast enough to see what happens next. At the centerpiece of a group of complex and compelling characters is Renata. Sexy yet deadly, Renata would like to think she believes in nothing. She is early described as having no feelings: "But she has none--no love, no pain . . . Life is safe when nothing matters." A prostitute who gives her body for money, and enjoys what she does, whether it is with a male or female, she still allows herself to be drawn into a kind of black hole from which none of the characters may escape. Francisco is described as "her lover and business partner," but even he wants more from her than the incredible sex they experience. Her next door neighbor, Jules, an aspiring writer who listens at the hole in the wall to Renata's sexual encounters, is drawn into Renata's life and may lose herself. The most haunted is Renata's obsessed poetry professor, Richard, who wants to take her away from all this and will risk everything and descend to any depth to have her. Throw in assorted private eyes, greasy lawyers, an angry wife, angrier drug dealers, hungry alligators, an impending hurricane, and a four foot Burmese python (just a baby) named Pepe that also loves Renata and mix them into the dark underbelly of Miami Beach that tourists seldom get to see or even imagine and you will be staring into a maelstrom for which the word noir doesn't seem dark nor hot enough. You will find yourself reading this book more than once.
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