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The Raunch Review: Book 22

We are nearly at the big red door onto virgin territory. Imagine what exciting shit is out there. I’m so insatiable that I actually started my 2023 pocket diary already. What a terrible bitch! Patience doesn’t exist anymore, remember. Everything is binge binge binge until there’s nothing left, but emptiness and wrappers. So we might as well get on with it. Get reading. Those dicks won’t suck themselves, as my mum always says. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that carrot-nosed question: can a good book ever be as naughty/nice as a good fuck?

Book title: Portnoy’s Complaint
Author: Philip Roth
Publisher of this edition: Vintage UK, Random House
Copyright: © Philip Roth 1967, 1968, 1969
First published: 1969
Cover art: Daido Moriyama

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  The novel is written in the form of a lengthy sexually explicit monologue by the main character Alexander Portnoy to his psychoanalyst. Portnoy details his ongoing inability to enjoy his sexual conquests, which become more and more extreme. He also likes masturbating or sweating his onions, and I mean loads, like tens of times a day. 

Title: The book centres on exploring the fuck bangs that never end in catharsis. It begins with a clinical definition of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” which is said to be a disorder that wages war between ethical impulses and perverse sexual desire. The definition is provided by Portnoy’s psychoanalyst, who states that he believes the symptoms, supposedly displayed by the main character, are linked to the mother-child relationship. 

Cover image: A naughty look up some fishnet tights. Sexy up-skirting yeah. Like an erotic kaleidoscope of bunched thighs and folds leading you in. The feeling here is that she’s game, whoever the bird is with the legs, given that this type of tights are said to be exclusively worn by sluts.    

Best sentence/s in the book:

Then came adolescence – half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out.

Nonetheless, it would seem that I never forgave her: in the weeks following our false alarm, she came to seem to me boringly predictable in conversation, and about as desirable as blubber in bed. 

“Come, Big Boy, come,” screamed the maddened piece of liver that, in my own insanity, I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. 

Did I mention that when I was fifteen I took it out of my pants and whacked off on the 107 bus from New York? 

Once in the morning (in an overgrown field near the lake shore) we had sexual congress, and then that afternoon, on a dirt road somewhere in the mountains of central Vermont, she said “Oh, Alex, pull over, now – I want you to come in my mouth,” and so she blew me, and with the top down!

Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: “Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.” 

You put your dick some place and moved it back and forth and stuff came out the front. 

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Overall sexual content: I wouldn’t say it’s a sexy read. Obviously this guy has issues and therefore lots of the dick based detail is centred on him wanking off in unusual and risky situations. He spends a lot of time pretending to his family that he has diarrhoea so that he can masturbate in the toilet, whilst his mum and dad frantically bang on the door begging him not to flush.  

Surprisingly, our main character does manage to have actual sex with lots of women, but most of it is disrespectfully described. He wants to have dirty sex with sluts basically, so that he can fuck them and get them to do whatever his fat controller fancies in that particular moment. Because don’t forget, he is tilting his sword at windmills with no hope of actually being satisfied. 

Overall conclusion: 6 out of 10.

Titillation station: I had high hopes for this well-respected wad of filth, but was sadly frustrated. No bristling or flinching whatsoever. The equivalent of a badly defrosted fish finger sandwich, which tastes like glass on the way down. 

Food for thought: It’s interesting that Roth used the old therapist/patient relationship as the basis for the book. A confession of sorts of a young man’s inner most desires and thoughts, no holes barred. Full frontal honesty or at least his version of how he wants to come across. Mr Roth is making us into smug voyeurs of sorts, like when people watch Embarrassing Bodies on telly with a bucket of popcorn to make themselves feel better about the shit they’ve got creeping about under their clothes. 

The most memorable bit in the book is when Alex masturbates with a piece of raw liver that his family then cooks and eats that evening. He sits there with them and eats it as well I might add. They have no idea why they get a mouth full of crusty wire pubes. Luckily, the book ends with him not being able to get it up anymore. Thank fuck! 

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The Raunch Review: Book 21

Violet Malice has become obsessed with the popular idiom COLD TURKEY given it’s that time of year again. It’s a multifaceted bird when you start thinking about it. You get the feeling that no body likes COLD TURKEY and in actual fact it might be pretty unbearable. Those grey pieces of dry sand-paper in-between two cold slices of bread with a bit of cranberry lube to help it get down the pipes. Drowning in a house full of shit gifts and torn-up wrapping paper. The internet says that the opposite of COLD TURKEY is HOT TORTOISE because they take their time and are pretty tasty. It’s shocking that the classic Xmas bird has such a bad rep when we consider that it’s the bird with the most generous cavity. As an example of just how gargantuan the storage possibilities, in the olden days (Xmas 2011), Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall stuffed nine other birds into a turkey’s orifice: a goose, a duck, a mallard, a guinea fowl, a chicken, a pheasant, a partridge in a pear tree, a working class pigeon and finally, a little pink woodcock. The question is, in this cruel world we live in: why do turkeys exist if no one actually likes them? If chickens do it better in terms of thigh and breast, why do we let the old turkey crown keep coming on the kitchen table for Christmas? Sadly, the answers to these questions might evade us forever. Now back to business, Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that neon question: can a good book ever be as costly as a good fuck?

Book title: The Enormous Bed
Author: Henry Jones
Publisher of this edition: K & G Publications
Copyright: © Brandon House 1967
First published: 1967
Cover art: Doesn’t say

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  A posh guy called Henry – who is convinced he’s a pretty good shag – tells us some anecdotes about his life, and by life I mean his sex life. The book basically details the ins and outs of this guy’s sexual pursuits. 

Title: I suppose it’s a poetic nod to the shrieking mattress. The spring loaded playground of the playboy. A bed is not for sleeping in after all. Or at least that’s what I asked for in Bensons For Beds: a bed for fucking, no sleeping allowed under any circumstances. All the guy gave me was a funny look. 

Cover image: One of the trashiest covers I’ve come across so far. Crumpled swags of red velvet suggest luxury and passion. The naked big breasted woman with no eyes in the top right looks like she’s imprisoned in some sort of bed cage. If she was smiling, I might think differently. But her servitude gives me the willies and suggests that this is a man’s book. 

Best sentence/s in the book:

We were locked utterly in need, a self-destroying monster, jerking as one. 

I was close to the hot top of all my striving. 

Finally she seemed to go mad and worked herself desperately, while I redoubled my onslaught until, in a double rear of our bucking bodies, the long drawn thread of my being poured free into her. 

It was more like a foam-rubber playground than a place for sleeping.

Utterly exhausted, our one body hunched on itself like a weary worm. 

There was plenty of room to swing a blonde and my thoughts were already turning in that direction. 

The pink expanse of quilt quivered.  

“I want,” I said, “to go to bed with you very badly.”

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Overall sexual content: Pretty steamy. The book is majority sex, which is how I like my pork pies, lots of meat and not much jelly. But I wouldn’t necessarily say that the sex is hot. The main problem is that the guy can write. And I mean he can write properly. A poet in the rough. Apparently, an author and critic in his own right, John Coleman joins the battalion of serious writers that chose to disguise themselves when they penned a dirty book for cash. 

I reckon the book would have been more randy if the main character had been more likeable (Henry is so posh and arrogant that you can’t help but despise him and his mega dicked ego). This guy thinks he can bed any/everyone with a pulse and given that he’s telling the story, that’s exactly what he does. He gets seduced and used for sex all the time by these insatiable big titted bitches, which is obviously pretty fucking terrible and exhausting for him. BOOHOO!

Overall conclusion: 7 out of 10.

Titillation station: The Guardian did an article some years ago saying that the book contains some of the best sex scenes ever written. I would beg to differ on that. The sex scenes are OK – when 17 year old Henry gets seduced by the headmaster’s wife, or when Henry gets a job ‘servicing’ a young woman. But they are hardly memorable. I don’t think my breathing changed at all whilst reading them, so you know… all quiet on the M62. 

Food for thought: I don’t get on with books that paint women as sexual aggressors all the time. I don’t find that sort of shit erotic. There is an undercurrent of dislike and one-upmanship in that sort of thinking that really gets my goat. And my goat likes to have lots of nice warm milky sex. 

At one point Henry calls one of his friends a professional skirt chaser that kind of sums it up for me. Hopefully all these men are dead now. 

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The Raunch Review: Book 19

Violet Malice has been hard at it. Don’t expect her to back down anytime soon. Sometimes the best things are worth waiting for, like when you queue for two hours for the salad buffet at Pizza Hut and it’s all over dressed and limp around the lips. Some educated people have been saying this book review is a bag of severed dicks and that it should be wiped from the internet like dog shit off a bushy moustache. There are other people that say Violet is choosing the wrong books, you know the valueless pulpy sacks of shit that are not worth the paper they are printed on. They say that maybe she should review the great sex classics written by the inventors of titillation like Henry Miller and all the other bloated big-dicked misogynists that have their heads so far up their own arses that they can’t piss straight. Violet thinks all those people can go fuck themselves. Write your own blog you lazy twats. She’s fine with no one reading any of this – you know what, it’s probably best. So here we go, Violet’s weekly adult book review dives into the 70s this week in an attempt to answer that unadulterated question: can a good book ever be as dishonest as a good fuck?

Book title: Confessions of a Housewife!?*!
Author: Jonathan May
Publisher of this edition: Sphere Books
Copyright: © Jonathan May 1976
First published: 1976
Cover photo: Doesn’t say

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  Jonny meets an older woman in a taxi and ends up going home with her. When the horny widow wins a six-week holiday on a spot the ball competition, Jonny finds himself standing in as the ‘housewife’ for her three children. Needless to say, chaos ensues. 

Title: One of the infamous confessions’ books from the 70s, the titles of which all begin the same and focus on the sordid confessions of certain archetypes. This book is particularly playful in that it places the hapless male in the thankless and hopefully totally redundant role of the housewife. 

Cover image: The rogue male is wearing just an apron and drying the dishes, how terrifying. Some hot blonde has got her bare arse all over the surfaces, which obviously turns all our stomachs. Hygiene is a keystone to keeping house. He looks pretty pleased with himself. Like housework is well easy and fun, which is obviously not fucking true. He’s not taking this seriously I suspect, which makes me angry.  

Best sentence/s in the book:

I help the lovely lady on with her flimsy tight black lacy knickers, pulling them carefully up over her long firm thighs, and pressing them into her pussy pelmet so that they nestle snugly in place. 

For a moment I think of that awful bit in Jaws, when the naked bird who’s just had it away, finally has it off by the shark. 

My veal vibrator is rocking and rolling like Chuck Berry with the wind behind him. 

The lady gets her morning tit-bit, and I slide down and give a demonstration of what a cunning linguist I am. 

The first time wasn’t easy, with her lying there like a dead polar bear, and me working away like a docker on overtime. 

The velvet vacuum cleaner is going full force.

By reaching all the way round her, my nimble right hand can manage a bit of extra massage on her booster button. 

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Overall sexual content: Well, well, well. I’m going to shock you now and say that the sex bits are pretty good. Light-hearted, funny and yes, actually, pretty thrilling. The Jonny character is an arrogant cad, but the careful nuance of the writing also makes him a bit of a loser, so it actually works really well. So rather than being a big turn-off, which is what I expected from a sleazy male focused dirty book from the 70s, it was actually a blast. 

Although there are countless motions towards aggressive female desire, the humour and ridicule of the main character make any such comments harmless and part of the overall power struggle inherent to all sexual dynamics. There is great humour in the lies we tell ourselves and the positions we put ourselves in when the curtains are drawn. 

Overall conclusion: 5 out of 10.

Titillation station: A riot really. A great quickie with some laugh out loud moments and no room for any deep thinking. Sometimes that’s exactly what the doctor orders. A momentary escape from reality. 

Food for thought: A prolific and respected sci-fi writer in his own right, Laurence James moonlighted as Jonathan May to write a large helping of this sleaze series. It’s hard to know exactly who they were intended for – my guess is probably men because of the humour and the male focused kink (our Jonny wants to and eventually does have sex with the 17-year-old daughter), but I could be wrong. It seems that pseudonyms helped to save the ‘straight’ writer from any bad shit that might come of writing naughty things. 

Our narrator Jonny calls his prick Edgar, which is actually very funny. It helps to give his cock a life of its own.  There’s no dark undertone to this, but this personification of the genitals does give our protagonist the ability to distance himself from his dick’s behaviour, which is not progress. That way leads to the horror of not being accountable for our actions. Letting ourselves off the meat hook for the good, the bad and the ugly. 

The book is a right laugh, and I really was pleasantly surprised. When I picked the book up, I took a deep breath and steeled myself against what I suspected would be a hornet’s nest of offensive tripe. But I was wrong. These books are a bit of fun. Not to be taken seriously. I mean – of course – they are not the best thing every written, but equally they are far from the worst. It’s actually very hard to write funny. I would gladly have a burrow in the rest of the series when I fancy getting the old laughing tackle out for some gagging. 

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The Raunch Review: Book 18

Violet Malice has been hedging her bets by rubbing her balls with sandpaper and/or sweetened saliva. You can easily get your hands on some of the sweet stuff by eating loads of meringue nests and then decanting your spit into an old milk bottle. Under Law 41 of the Laws of Cricket, the ball can be polished without the use of an artificial substance, or towel dried if wet. In the event that it gets covered in shit, the ball has to be cleaned under strict supervision. Throw some balls at Violet’s crease, she likes that. She’s tampered with a few leathery ones in her time. Anyway, let’s crack on. Time is money after all (or that’s what all the pinstriped pigs want us to believe). Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that interhuman question: can a good book ever be as blindingly dystopian as a good fuck?

Book title: Now The Night Begins
Author: Alain Guiraudie
Translator: Jeffrey Zuckerman
Publisher of this edition: Semiotext(e)
Copyright: © Semiotext(e) 2018
Translation copyright: © Jeffrey Zuckerman
First published: 2014
Cover art: Paul Klee

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: The book tracks the comings and goings of a strange sexual relationship between a 90-year old patriarch (who is known as Grampa in the book) and a 40-year old family friend called Gilles. The book begins with Gilles stealing Grampa’s underwear off the washing line and masturbating into them in front of Grampa and his daughter who are dozing on the sofa. The daughter calls the police about the stolen underpants (as it’s happened three or four times now and she’s getting well pissed) and so Gilles hangs them back on the line full of cum. The police then go on a horrifying rampage when they discover the culprit. Gilles then begins a fiery sexual relationship with the police chief, who he witnesses murder another man. So pretty spicy dystopian stuff!

Title: A pretty boring title given the content of the book, which is hardcore to put it mildly. If it was mustard it would be eye-wateringly English. The blandness of the title is funny, like calling a perverse dystopian sex book Cupcakes and U-Bends or One Pretty Foggy Evening in June. I reckon Alain was having a laugh with the title. Gilles does end up going to visit Grampa at night because of the police presence and obviously ‘night’ and ‘darkness’ have connotations of suffering and the loss of humanity. 

Cover image: A nice bit of cubist surrealism by Paul Klee. Very shifty and in keeping with the impending darkness that surrounds the image. This work is called Fire at Full Moon and was completed by Klee in 1933. It certainly entices us into the dystopian world under the covers. 

Best sentence/s in the book:

I’m so turned on that in no time I’m spurting in Grampa’s underwear. 

“It looks like ejaculate,” says the chief. 

Then I see his balls dripping with shit. 

I shake my head to rid myself of this shit rag, I can’t hear anything anymore, I struggle and wait until someone shoots me in the head.

After all, yes, I’m pretty sure this little bout of masturbating in her father’s underwear hasn’t made her happy. 

I feel like he might bite off my dick with his teeth. 

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Overall sexual content: Lots of very interesting sexiness. The chemistry between Grampa and Gilles is really interesting and challenging, particularly given society’s aversion to sexualising older people. This book is exciting in that it opens up a whole host of other types of sexual relationships that do not fit the rules, which go way beyond the simple ins and outs of body bits. 

The sex is hot and there’s lots and lots of it. The dystopian feel to the book with its ultra-violence and its strange drives, gives a desperation to the sex and a kind of horror. Gilles ends up falling in love with the police chief who forced a baton up his arse in the opening pages, but despite the mutual attraction their intimacy is tainted by Gilles’ growing fear that the chief will kill him in the end.

Overall conclusion: 8 out of 10.

Titillation station: Horny badger in a dark dark forrest that is feeling around for some warm flesh to sigh into. That said you can’t really let yourself go when there’s all that mass horror swirling around the pages, so this one might be more for the specialist wanker. 

Food for thought: An absolutely fantastic book, which has obviously received a lot of bad press given the challenging subject matter. Some critics/idiots have called it deeply offensive, which I can’t get my head around at all. It seems people really don’t like thinking about 90-year olds having any sort of feelings left. Given that Gramps is well up for it (although we’re never really sure what it is) then it’s hardly an abusive situation. And the whole point anyway is that neither of them actually want to have sex with each other, but there is this powerful desire between them that drives them both to want to lay in bed together naked talking in a dialect (Occitan) that only they share. 

The murder never gets solved and we never find out what the police chief is really playing at – whether his relationship with Gilles is some strange trap or whether he genuinely loves him. The characters are all exploding and bloated with unsaid and unanswered questions much like life. Thrashing around with shackles biting into our ankles. 

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The Raunch Review: Book 14

Violet Malice has been digging out the knitwear and gently handling moth balls. The weather has taken a turn this week, from mild to nippy. It seems that September has burnt itself out and everyone’s legs and bottom cheeks have gone into hibernation. Violet has taken to reading late into the morning, under the covers with a steaming cup of tea and some nice biscuits (describing word rather than nice biscuits themselves which are not actually very nice). Sometimes staying in bed is the best we can do. This week’s reading material has been a bitter lid to lick. Like one of those massive tubs of yogurt with a handle that you buy because it makes sense fiscally, but which turns out to taste like absolute fucking shit. Not all books should be easy and soft, some books are better read pushed up against a load-bearing wall. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that overpowering question: can a good book ever be as lip suckingly horrifying as a good fuck?

Book title: The Sluts
Author: Dennis Cooper
Publisher of this edition: Carroll & Graf Publishers
Copyright: © Dennis Cooper 2004
First published: Sections first appeared in various literary magazines
Cover photo: David Sprigle

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: The book is made up of a mishmash of reviews from the pages of a website for gay male escorts, message boards and emails. It focuses on the goings on of one particular escort and his sugar daddy, which escalates into a huge steaming paella of horrendously explicit sex practices, lies, fantasies and online posturing.

Title: The Sluts is a pretty wet nosed title, if you ask me, given the absolute depravity in the book. It probably should have been much more hardcore given that most of the activity in the book focuses on extreme S&M and online sex people obsessing over the thought of young twinks being bred and killed.

Cover image: Well lit! Gritty and raw, full frontal, exactly like the insides.

Best sentence/s in the book:

I would have sold my mother into slavery to bury my face in that ass and feel my tongue inside that warm, perfect body.

His years as a heavy bottom have damaged it beyond repair, but you could say the same thing about the Grand Canyon. 

I recommend doing him with the lights on because you can stretch the elastic and look all the way into his beautiful, pulsing guts. 

He had a reputation among the regulars at the bar as an arrogant creep who charged a ridiculously large fee ($350) to sit on men’s faces and masturbate. 

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Overall sexual content: The book is full of extreme sex so it is very harrowing indeed. I had to have a breather on a number of occasions – particularly when towards the end, the young escort that is the focus of the book is castrated and raped, whilst been made to eat his own testicles.

The format and writing style captures the unrestrained and frightening depths of the online world – dark, unaccountable and anonymous. The narrator and every voice in the book is contradicted or exposed to be lying or withholding information, so the book begins to take on a fantasy of its own. Just when you feel as though something might be certain, everything is turned on its head and truth begins to dribble down your inside leg. Is anything true? Is anyone being serious? Is all this just a big collective wank fantasy?  

Much like the incel forums of today, which advocate sexual violence against women, there is a monstrously real quality to the sentiments expressed in the book. And even if these individuals are just fantasising about murdering beautiful young escorts and getting off on it – is that in itself OK? What about free speech? If every response is an escalation, if we need harder and harder stimulus, where will it end? Death and destruction? The final curtain. La petite mort pulls itself back together and then snuffs out for good. 

The online world has blown up the hornet’s nest of sex and debauchery and our ability to take on new identities and express extreme views to get a reaction. It has enabled us to get unrestricted access to anything we want. Enter conversations and be part of communities that we may not have had access to previously – but this can be positive and negative. Certainly, the book showcases the dangerous quicksand of message boards and online forums, which suck people in and pump violently until all that is left is bleached bones and a bucket of cum. 

Overall conclusion: 6 out of 10.

Titillation station: Sawdust and celibacy.

Food for thought: Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly a place for S&M and serious kink. What a beautiful flinching portmanteau of sadism (the pleasure from inflicting pain) and masochism (the pleasure from receiving it). First spewed from those two great fucking writers: sadism comes from the French sadisme named after the Marquis de Sade and masochism from that old bastard English named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The crucial thing about power and submission is the line really. Between perineum and arsehole. The space between the collar. The perspiration between pleasure and pain. Life and death. Fantasy and reality. Art and literature. Anticipation and… At what point do the seams come open and the doors fall off.

We are all shaped by power dynamics. Sex is about power. Sometimes the powerful want to get on their carpet burned fucking knees and dine out on shit and vice versa. But I would suggest that pain and abuse without trust becomes a whole different beast when it makes that leap into the real world. 

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Violet Malice

Suck It and See