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The Raunch Review: Book 24

Greetings from the middle of February.  Are you ready for a thriller?

I have been swelling. Like a jaundice Soufflé aux épinards. I looked in the mirror one rusty morning and was pretty bowled over. I had grown at least two feet and still had the remnants of the night before on my face. I had juiced a man’s prostate. He had a lot in the trap, if you catch my drift. I suspect he hadn’t let the pigeons out in a while. They were all breaking their necks to get into the fresh air. It’s nice to feel close to someone sometimes. Like right up in their mechanism. Anyway, Violet’s weekly adult book review has dropped and it’s a hard-boiled bollock of a thriller. The aim, as always, is to attempt to answer that pregnant question: can a good book ever be as brain-dead as a good fuck?

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Book title: In The Cut
Author: Susanna Moore
Publisher of this edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright: © Susanna Moore 1995
First published: 1995
Cover image: Emilio Brizzi / Millennium Images, UK

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  In The Cut is a gut wrenching thriller, which follows the comings and goings, and inner workings, of an English teacher at New York University who becomes sexually involved with a policeman investigating the brutal murders of a number of women in the area. 

Title: This one has multiple levels of meaning. The murders all involve women being butchered with blades. Our narrator, Frannie, is also studying New York street slang, which unsurprisingly is very derogatory in nature.  Being ‘in the cut’ is used by several characters to mean ‘in the vagina’.  

Cover image: A close-up of a side profile looking backwards. It is a loaded look, make-up laden and sexual, vulnerable and yet defiant. Certainly, women in this book are being hunted and brutalised. They are the target of hatred even though they don’t necessarily realise it yet. 

Best sentence/s in the book:

“My dick’s so sweet, it’ll give you cavities.”

The cunt was fucking everything that walked. 

I, who refused for years to let my husband in Paris realize his life’s ambition of photographing a scorpion in my vagina. 

“You know, all you really need is two tits, a hole and a heartbeat.”

He doesn’t talk about sex the way some men do, wanting to go over it, wanting to hear the woman describe what it was like, how she hadn’t been able to wipe herself for a week. 

“I loved her so much I used to eat her every night.”

She had a meaty, fat pussy. 

He turned me around and bent me over the desk, yanking my skirt around my waist, and pulled aside my underpants and pushed his fingers, fingers, all his fingers inside me. 

“The only way I could tell he’d come was that he’d look at his watch.”

I was suddenly ashamed, ashamed that there would be an odor, or that his cock would have shit on it, and I could not look. 

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Overall sexual content: The book is full of sex. It is a thriller in more ways than one. Raw, stinking and writhing about the page on the knife edge between lust and hate. It is not an erotic book for me – in the sense that the brutality and general malice that accompanies all the sexual scenarios dribbles through and makes the sex repulsive. Sex is made into something dangerous and frightening, something violent and isolating. It is clap cold, like a body on a slab. 

Aside from the undercurrent of violence that permeates this thriller and annihilates the majority of the titillating aspects, the sex is fantastically well drawn. It feels authentic and desperate and real. Who said that erotica has to encourage positive sexual feelings? Maybe it can make us shrivel up and dry.  

Overall conclusion: 10 out of 10!!!!

Titillation station: It is titillating to a very small degree. The sexual passages are detailed and arousing. That is part of its power. Sex has got a lot to do with the power dynamic, whichever way you position it. And the feelings we have about sex are complex and hard to comprehend. 

Food for thought: It is one of the best books ever written, in my puffed up opinion. It captures something important, something that exists and walks around with us. The female characters are also flawed. The narrator suspects that the policeman she is fucking is a bad man, but she keeps having it off with him anyway. It paints female sexual desire on the page in a brash and real way, as present and obvious. Over the top of that is daubed the aggressive and predatory sexual desire of the male characters, who hold powerful positions in society that are supposed to protect us. The policeman’s hat and the policeman’s badge. His hand cuffs and his arrest warrants. Particularly, it illustrates the use of sex as a weapon and the culture amongst men that can dehumanise the object of their desires. Maybe because they have become too responsible for their own lives. 

Nobody can ignore when reading this book – and probably why it was reissued in 2021 – the parallels with the real culture of misogyny in the police force. The devastating atrocities that have happened in recent memory in full view. The way women are described and the way sex is achieved in this book is pumped full of disgust and one-upMANship. 

I won’t ruin the end. Or tell you how it turns out. Except that it is devastating and close to the nerve to acknowledge that a policeman cutting women’s nipples off and eventually using them as chum, and that person being very confident that he will get away with it, is not shocking and it should be. 

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The Raunch Review: Book 23

You’ll never guess what…

I went to the snooker final. I am a big fan of ball sports that involve dickie bows and waistcoats. It really gives me the horn, all that bending over the table. All that chalking the tip. All that synthetic resin dropping like batter into hot oil. It was pretty mouth-watering. I didn’t want it to end. But, alas, as the saying goes, everything must come at the end. Otherwise no one’s allowed to finish. Violet’s weekly adult book review is streaking into 2023. A whole new year of reading. All bouncy, pink and vulnerable. As we attempt to answer that inflatable question: can a good book ever be as buoyant as a good fuck?

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Book title: Available: A Memoir of Sex and Dating After a Marriage Ends 
Author: Laura Friedman Williams
Publisher of this edition: The Borough Press, HarperCollinsPublishers
Copyright: © Laura Friedman Williams 2021
First published: 2021
Cover art: plainpicture/amanaimages/LUSH LIFE/A.collection

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  This is a very personal account of a woman’s plunge into sex and dating after her 22-year marriage ends. Laura, a 47-year-old mother of three, dishes the dirt on what it’s like to put an unfamiliar prick in your arse after two decades of nothing fucking. How to pluck your bean up out of the gutter and try to form some sort of identity out of the ruins. 

Title: I am AVAILABLE. A pretty horrifying statement after a lifetime of putting other people’s needs before your own. To be consumed by Mother and Wife. What a pair of cunts. What a horrifying thought, to be available. A pint of single cream sat in the fridge counter waiting to be wanted. 

Cover image: A lovely looking peach with an erotic looking crease. How delicious. Fruit is sexy, we all know that. My only beef is that maybe the crease is too straight. It makes me think that this might be a genetically modified stoned fruit. No one has a perfectly straight furry arse crevice. Not that I’ve cum across anyway (and I’ve had my fair share of A2M, according to the UK government’s National Statistics). 

Best sentence/s in the book:

I have always gagged giving blow jobs. 

More importantly, two men have now independently surveyed the state of my vagina and given it the all-clear. 

There is something that makes a man look so vulnerable when he is handling himself […]. 

I am too shy to do what I really want, which is to tell him this is my first close-up with an uncircumcised penis, and to more closely examine it, so I settle for another round of sex and then agree we can go eat dinner. 

I am scared to say no to this man – he is intense and determined, and I fear that I might have led him to this inevitable conclusion so that saying no now would brand me a tease, a blue-baller, a naïf, someone who doesn’t understand the sexual dynamics between a man and a woman. 

“Can I have you one more time before you go?”

When his finger slides inside me, my eyes dart to the side where a large group of millennials is gathered next to us. 

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Overall sexual content: I mean it’s a bit of a curve ball, it’s actually autobiographical and as such not a balls out dirty book. The writer is navigating her reawakening as a single sexual being, so there is a focus on sex, the ins and outs, and navigating the rough seas of expectation. It’s not exactly titillating, but there is an erotic aspect to the very intimate account of someone tiptoeing into the bedroom after their whole life has been dissolved by lies. Someone that is being very honest about what they see in front of them – genital warts and all – and the internal battles they are fighting. 

There is lots of detail about the sex being served up and this new frontier. I would say that it is hard to be all fired up like a wood burner when someone is being so personal about their hang-ups and surprised at how much dick someone has got.  That’s a bit of a mood killer for the one-handed reader. 

Overall conclusion: 6 out of 10.

Titillation station: It would be unfair of me to say that I thought this was erotica. It’s not. But it is taking on the erotic nevertheless. I think this is a warm load of reading that hopes to empower people and in this instance that is a much more valuable proposition than a masturbatory back-flip. 

Food for thought: It is a page-turner indeed and I did enjoy the ease in which Laura weaves her story. I think these sorts of personal books about sex are important to help people navigate the peaks and troughs of life, and find hope where seemingly there is none. 

The jarring aspect for me was the sharp self-doubt about the aging female body. It is understandable that a woman that has never explored her sexuality outside of her fucking boring marriage would be unsure of how desirable she is in the brave new Tinder filled world. But I didn’t like the fact that Laura had to be constantly reassured about the state of her tits and her fanny by a host of gym-addicted dicks on sticks. I was disappointed that she needed that reassurance even after she has blazed her own sexy path through the low hanging fruits of the forest.

I think that if women internalise a dislike for their own aging bodies because they think that men won’t find them sexy, that’s a massive part of the problem. What is it with women and aging? Surely, it’s something to be celebrated. I think this book made me feel more conscious of my body as a commodity – as something that degrades and decays. Women need to be kind. The alternative is an expensive smile and tits with no give. 

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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 20

Violet Malice has been worrying about the cost of living and the sharp increase in the price of salad cream. It’s like they don’t think we’ll notice. It’s £3.29 in ASDA. Like what the total fuck! How is that even possible. The main ingredients are water, vinegar and plastic. As a comparison, you can buy 32 pork mini eggs just a few aisles away for a tight £3.50. Insanity. Or you can get Dr Oetker’s extra strong black food colouring for £1.50, but one unsatisfied customer said that it comes out “kind of grey”. It seems that living comfortably might be the Christmas wish on most of our lips. Having enough warm socks to make a draft excluder and some proper non-scented candles to light up the dark. There are around 20 calories in a tablespoon of semen and sadly very little nutritional value, just so you know. On the other hand, there are around 42 calories per fluid ounce in pussy juice. Sexy. How to stay hot when it’s arctic out there? There she blows, Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that hangry question: can a good book ever be as thick and saucy as a good fuck?

Book title: Candy
Authors: Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg
Publisher of this edition: Bloomsbury
Copyright: © Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg 1958, 1959, 1962, 1964
First published: 1958
Cover art: Doesn’t say

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  Eighteen year-old Candy is drop dead gorgeous, so much so that every man she comes into contact with wants to fuck her. The book presents a landslide of farcical sexual encounters, which all involve the naïve young woman being pressured into sex and then something disastrous happens mid-shag. 

Title: The main focus of the book is a woman called Candy. Pretty straightforward. Everyone wants candy. 

Cover image: Nice er… typeface. Pink and curvy. I must say the cover is pretty trashy and childish. I was ashamed to spread the covers on public transport as an experienced reader of quality filth. The illustration of a young woman in just her bra is probably an accurate reflection of the content inside. Pretty damn pathetic. 

Best sentence/s in the book:

She still wasn’t sure she might not be dealing with some kind of raving, anal-erotic maniac. 

You will notice that I have caused my member to become stout and rigid – as though it were in the so-called state of ‘erection’. 

“Here’s a credential for you, momma!” said the police officer in the back seat with her, and he tore open his fly and forced her hand inside. 

“Like salami wouldn’t melt in your mouth!”

He was keeping his eyes trained on the scalloped V, beneath which pulsed Candy’s precious little lamp-pit. 

“Not so distasteful, I daresay, as your fat clit!” 

“Perfect! Her tubes are perfect!” 

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Overall sexual content: Awful. All of the sex is repulsive and ridiculous. A bad tasting combination. The whole book centres on aggressive male desire (so men being helpless sex beasts in the face of young beauty) and the subservience of women, whose bashful desire is seemingly only activated by being needed/wanted by men. 

Candy is forced into sex by her father’s identical twin, a gynaecologist, a hunchback who wants to steal all her money, and a philosopher, not to mention all of the other characters who try to cop a feel (police officers, a psychiatrist, etc etc). The book cums to a big end with a pretty monumental sex scene. A building is struck by lightening and begins to fall apart, which forces her cunt onto the erect penis of a man covered in mud. A statue falls down and becomes impaled in her arsehole as she begins rocking backwards and forwards on this guy’s cock, who she suddenly recognises as her father. 

Overall conclusion: 2 out of 10.

Titillation station: There are a few sexy bits. But on the whole the book is totally ridiculous and vile. Everything withered up and died. One of the quotes on the back of the book says ‘Sex, after this event, will never be the same,’ and I kind of agree, it totally put me off sex with men. Sexual desire presented as a desperate, violent, uncontrollable and selfish sick dog is the anthesis of sexy. Sadly, there are too many real-life examples of this sort of behaviour for the book to be funny. 

Food for thought: Both of the writers (who originally wrote the novel under the pseudonym Maxwell Keaton) freely admitted writing this book just for the money and were flabbergasted when people reviewing the book said that Candy was a satire on Candide. Terry Southern said, “It’s as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it’s the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree.” 

The raging success of this book is a real shocker. To go down the hell hole of presenting a woman as so desirable that all men will basically rape her – even if you try and present it in a farcical way – is just deplorable. And the fact that Candy is so gullible and so desperate to please, makes it even worse. Female beauty exists to be tarnished and enjoyed at all costs it seems. And male power, physical and well as societal, makes this possible. Everyone that comes to Candy’s rescue tries to get into her knickers, like a run of horrifying dominoes. Because grateful is exactly how you want them. 

In 2006, Playboy Magazine placed Candy at number 22 in its list of the “25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written,” I wonder what sort of fucking prick compiled that list. It seems I might have lost my sense of humour. 

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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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Violet Malice

Suck It and See