Customer Reviews

Seven Tales of Sex and Death

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I found the first story and a story about horrifying evening entertainment based upon the creative sexual abuse quite gripping and underworld. There was also an interesting tale about people in France disappearing due to an unexplained disaster. These made the book shocking enough which is what the author probably wanted. The book had a lot of French affinity which would make it appealing to a francophile leaving aside sex and death.

But many of the other stories though interesting and provocative made you ask "so what?". One problem is that the author seems to try and project herself as a clever bilingual academic/scriptwriter which does not come across too well. Though scholarship/erudition when coming out through fiction is welcome, there was a flavour of immoral pretentiousness that made this book not worthy of keeping. It was a sort of "dark fiction, version lite". I gave this book away after finishing it.

I think I'll stick to Katherine Mansfield and some others for the moment as masters of the short story. The exploration of sexuality, male and female, clothes, objects in further detail could have helped on which the book could have been a lot stronger.