The Raunch Review: Book 13

Violet Malice has been off the radar for a week. Mainly because there were 32 lasagnas in the fridge that needed eating up and no one else fit enough for the job. Violet can really put it away when she wants to, just saying. Aside from the deep pasta trough of mid-September, Violet has also been consuming reading materials with gusto. Sadly, this latest book was like sucking on a used Johnny and then somehow finding it wrapped around the bilge pump of the rumpy pumpy section of the four seasons chamber orchestra. If Violet wasn’t so committed to the integrity of this unflinching review then the book at issue would have been thrown out of the window into a waiting dog’s arse. Or most likely it would have been placed in the Ramsgate library LARGE PRINT aisle even though it wasn’t from there and as such would have totally collapsed the shelving system. Satire. Violet’s weekly adult book review – yet again – attempts to answer that technical question: can a good book ever be as pop-eyed and yellow as a good fuck?

Front cover of Dead Babies by Martin Amis

Book title: Dead Babies
Author: Martin Amis
Publisher of this edition: Vintage UK, Random House
Copyright: © Martin Amis 1975
First published: 1975
Cover illustration: Sebastian Helling

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: A group of posh people, who are neither likeable nor particularly like each other, are in some big house and some American people arrive for the weekend. They have lots of drugs and sex organs. Obviously, it degrades.

Title: Don’t care. Characters refer to dead babies a few times but I really couldn’t be arsed to try and work out what the hell was being alluded to, sometimes you know the pay-off is not going to be worth the effort. I suspect that it relates to some ridiculous view that the vile characters in the book have that everyone else in the world is an idiot and should shut the fuck up and eat dead babies or something pathetic like that, much like the satirical suggestion pushed by Jonathan Swift that the Irish should eat their own children when things get tight. Satire = well intelligent.

Cover image: Pretty budget if you ask me. Someone got paid to drag a few clouds across a turquoise sky and lob in a few wobbly eggs/disco biscuits. The font – technically known as totally shagged – obviously suggests some sort of narcotics abuse given the inconsistency and overhang of the lettering. They should have spelt Martin’s name wrong – that would have been funny.

Best sentence/s in the book:

“You look absolutely extraordinary. Like a sex cubicle.”

Andy had had a coltish, alcoholic erection.

“Heard about The Body Bar in Santa Barbara? No? Hell of a fuckin place. The waiters and waitresses are nude, natch – and you get fucked there for the cover charge. But you hear the gimmicks? You can have cuntcubes in your drinks. I mean it. And not just flavoured with cunt. Real juice in the cubes. They got… yeah, they got tit soda, cock cocktails, pit popsicles… Oh, yeah, and icecream that tastes of ass. Hell of a place.” 

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Overall sexual content: I had this joke in the olden days: I went to bed with Martin Amis and was underwhelmed. Sometimes I said disappointed instead of underwhelmed depending on my mood. Well, Martin, I let you under the covers again and I started feeling agitated by your sour tongue and your massive ego. You can write Martin – but you’re much less good at it than you think you are.  

The sex is pretty awful. Much promised and nothing delivered. I’m well aware that that is what the book is supposed to be out – lots of drug taking and floppy cocks, but it’s all a bit too fucking boring for my liking. All the characters are vile and all their interactions are pointless so it’s really hard to wade through all the treacly prose of a literary male having a circle jerk with himself.

The married sex is the best – and I never thought I’d ever say that – but even then he makes it proper cringe. All small talk and back rubs. All bacon rashers for breakfast and flustered fussy fingering of orifices.

I was hoping that everyone would die in the end – for the best – but only one person did which was so fucking incredibly boring. Lots of the characters tried to commit suicide but failed. There’s something about such a hopeless load of raw untreated shit that feels incredibly lazy and arrogant – it’s not satire if it has nothing to say. Yes, we are all morons with mouths and arseholes but what’s your fucking point Martin, you old sod.

Overall conclusion: 1 out of 10.

Titillation station: Not in anyway even slightly sexy. Even the sex words that I know and love lost there kick and gnash. We are all dead. And just as one of the abysmal characters chimes, sex has become a mere bodily function like shitting. Hooray! Maybe satire can’t be sexy? Maybe satire has to be impotent?

Food for thought: There isn’t any. I don’t like food or thinking anymore.

A quick fact about Martin Amis: he acknowledged during an interview once that sex scenes in novels are always terrible. Dear, oh fucking dear! Maybe, how about, I’m just thinking, maybe, just maybe, have a go at writing a good sex scene then Martin you lazy fucking cunt. Presuming you’ve had one. Or can imagine a good one. Because that’s supposed to be your fucking purpose right – imagining things that us vacant cretins might learn something from.

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The Raunch Review: Book 10

Violet Malice with a beard

Violet Malice has been reading pulpy paperbacks like nobody’s business this week. Beware of the sex robot. She has been ruminating on the use of keelhauling in the olden days and wondering whether taking the width instead of the length as punishment would be shameful. If you were unlucky enough to survive, of course. On the look out for a bedtime read that gets the sweat glands firing and the deep oval grape getting eaten. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that multifaceted question: can a good book ever be as liquid as a good fuck?

Pulp paperback by Ed Martin

Book title: Frankenstein ’69
Author: Ed Martin
Publisher of this edition: The Olympia Press
Copyright: © Ed Martin 1969
Publication date of this edition: 1972
Cover photo: Giles Lagarde

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: A castle-dwelling scientist Ygor and his insatiable wife Hortense (how do you make a whore tense?) conduct sex research on two students. Meanwhile, Ygor finally succeeds in bringing to life three beautiful virgins, constructed from metal pipes and screw bits, otherwise known as Frankensteinesses. The rub comes in the shape of a higher power: Appalled by the fact that one of Ygor’s students has become pregnant, while her virginity remains in tact, which means that she will give birth to an amphibian, the king of the mermaids orders two of his randiest stooges to go and ‘unpregnant’ her. Then it all kicks off – as one might expect.

Title: The title is pretty good – it certainly piqued my interest – even though it doesn’t really fit with the story. Yes – the mad scientist creates some robot sex humans but they are not really human or at least they are not made from human body parts like Frankenstein’s monster. Although Ygor and his wife do find themselves disgusted by their creations, and have to runaway on several occasions, because the sex robots won’t stop having sex with them or each other. It’s likely the title was given to Ed Martin before he’d started writing.

The ’69 aspect presumably relates to the year it was written. Although I like to think it refers to all the long flowery descriptions of oral hygiene and sexy root canals littering the pages. I think at least 83% of the book is dedicated to the art of facetime or facedowntime. Like right down there. Up the guts.

Cover image: Beautiful. Iconic. What’s not to like? Although, she could be in a morgue or on a butcher’s slab. And the necklace – from far away – could look like her head has been sewn on. Much like Frankenstein’s creature. But he was a hideous amalgam of corpses remember. Not a rosebud about to be introduced to a force 5 (Beaufort scale, yeah).

Best sentence/s in the book:

“I’d love to screw something up your asshole and ram it in and out until you come like a fucking fountain.”

“If his nuts got any higher he might, as they say a bit coarsely, spray his fuck.”

“Hey, big-tits, swim over here and suck my cock.”

“You keep that up, baby, and I’m going to come off in your hand.”

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Overall sexual content: The BEST book I have ever read!

Not only is the sex amazing and glorious and poetically written, but it’s funny and warm and sticky and celebratory.

All of the characters love sex. All of the genitals receive a great deal of attention – literal and metaphorical. The mermaids have cocks and pussies and everybody gets off all of the time. Relentlessly. Gratuitously.

I’ve never read sex writing as good as this! I don’t know what else to say.

Even the bits about beastiality – when one of the mermaids has sex with a horse – are fucking ace-in-the-hole. Or when the virgin fucks herself with a log because she’s that way inclined.

Overall conclusion: 9.9 out of 10.

Titillation station: Liquid decadence has never felt this good. It used to smell like a hungry rainforest and now it smells like a sweaty man with a frothing mouth organ. I’m talking chocolate habanero (Scoville scale, alright).

Food for thought: This book is like if Shakespeare wrote some porn and wasn’t such a hairy conservative arsecrack, i.e. the dialogue and the description are fucking outstanding. As an example – because I can tell you’re doubting me – here are a few gems:

go ahead cook your tits —— (this had me literally pissing the bed)

a kind of relaxed mid-afternoon casual spontaneous prolonged fuck in the garden ———- (Jesus couldn’t have strung it out better)

they call the king of the mermaids a different term of formal address throughout the book, including: Your Quivering Prostate; His Permanent Erection; Centurion of Cuntjuice; Rector of Rectums; The Gaping Shaved Pussy; Master of the Triple Come; you get the picture…

What a gloriously fun book! The fantastical element – the mermaids and shit – is perfectly balanced in order to allow the reader to dip their toe into the deep dark pool of perversion without being pulled under. The virgin sex robot dolls element enables the writer to present sex from an entirely innocent and curious perspective without again careering into anything uncomfortable. And it makes for some great comedy:

Carole [the brunette sex robot] was still stretched out on the table. She had her pussy peeled down and was trying to fish inside for loose wires. “Someone has just got to fix my pussy,” she wails. And then later on she astutely observes: “Oh look, I’m getting the shit fucked out of me!” 

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New Writing: Private and Confidential

Violet Malice on the beach
Violet Malice
Fire doors and dressing gowns

Violet Malice has some hot smut cooking on the tarmac off the A-road by the Happy Shopper. Here is some writing. She has written. With you in mind. FYI the Raunch Review will return next week. Violet has been up in Edinburgh this week (hence the silence) watching the fringe pant. 

They sleep together. All over the place. The two of them.

In her living room. On the kitchen table.

Inside the duvet cover like ghosts. All over his bed. And then spilled on the carpet.

Against the wash basin. One leg bristling. Under the shower.

On tip toes behind an old English Master. Constable.

In the cold glow of the fridge. By the pre-tossed salad. In his living room.

Up against frosted glass. Under a bare bulb that flickers and teases moths mouths most nights. In the rain. In the driving rain.

In the middle of 12 Angry Men.

Between the mast and the rigging. Shrimper. Mainsail. And Boom!

Underwater.

Following two hardly dressed hamburgers topped with glassy tomatoes sliced and extruding. Tickling the ivories. The back teeth and all 206 bones. The sternum and the stapes. Intermediate phalanges.

Driving through the rain. The driving rain.

Starting in Times New Roman and being found face down in TNT Battenberg. Bold. Italics. Tits underlined.

On the corner of Christopher Street and Howard’s End. Trails.

In the mirror. In the mind’s eye. This way and that. Tossed. The other way around. Bouncing off iris. Lids closed shut for the weekend.

At their house. On their pressed sheets. It will happen. Tea sandwiches and finger rings.

And then. In the afternoon sun. Twenty-days on. Rises one towering Dracula. Hot bloodied and sex eyed. Desperate for a crisp IPA in the shade of their exhaustion.

Watch Violet’s poem about icecream

The Raunch Review: Book 8

Violet Malice has been lounging full bollock in the sunshine, during the hottest parts of the day, cracking one off every hour or so: it’s the ruddy bloody holidays, yeah! This week she has been cherry picking a short story or two, lapping up all that delicious mind tapas. Committed to finding a bedtime read that gets those glands producing in excess of the average 1500ml of saliva per day, metaphorical legs wrapped right round your mandibular ramus. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that chocolate flavoured question: can a good book ever be as Herman Count Van Rompuy as a good fuck?

Front cover of Granta: Sex

Magazine title: Sex
Publisher: Granta
Copyright: © 2010 Granta Publications
Magazine issue: 110
Short story title: THIS IS FOR YOU
Author: Emmanuel Carrère
Translator:
Linda Coverdale

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: Some sort of raging sex pervert has published a short story in a French newspaper and tells his girlfriend to buy a copy and read it on the train going from Paris to La Rochelle. The story – which is also being read by other people on the train – instructs her to reach orgasm between Niort and Surgères because presumably she’s bored of Slaughterhouse-Five. I know the feeling. Dishonourable discharge in a moving toilet.

Train travel: I am a big fan of the railway and masturbation (mutually exclusive, of course). The word train derives from the Latin trahere meaning “to pull, to draw”. A big engine relentlessly pulling off loads of carriages at speed through the countryside is a pretty sexy way to get from A(vignon) to B(rest). Plus the karzies are quite exciting – much like something from Jackson Pollock’s drip and shit period. There is some debate as to the origin of the intransitive verb masturbate. Some say it derives from some old shit meaning to “make yourself stupid” and/or “to disturb with the hand”. Following the invention of more or less everything, the hand has been made redundant.

I would also like to take issue with the making oneself stupid train of thought – I think our little friends serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin have tampered with the ball. You can’t make it taste that good if you don’t want us to eat it. And I certainly don’t come out of the other end stupid. The exact opposite. I find myself much better at exponentiation and domestic science (although I’m out of practice).

So, this short story piqued my interest. Mainly, because it’s very rare to find any sort of narrative written in the second person (you did this and you did that, you mother)! Sometimes (let me be clear, only in very limited sexual scenarios) we all like being told what to do. Obviously, I had to tie up the feminist in me beforehand and lock her in the room with the yellow wallpaper with some hard-backed political tomb to upset herself with. It’s a thrilling concept, to open up the daily newspaper and become part of somebody’s elaborate fantasy. Just like phone sex – there’s something desperately dirty about touching someone without touching them. A meeting in the dark recesses of the mind.

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Overall sexual content: It is massively titillating. In some ways, probably one of the most genuinely erotic pieces of writing I’ve ever read. The voyeurism element is nicely done but a bit annoying. The narrator refers to the fact that he wants to make the object of the story wet (his girlfriend), but also that the other women reading the newspaper at the same time should also be getting off. I suppose it’s a nice idea – some sort of train based wank party – but in reality my taste would be more along the lines of nobody else being in on the fantasy. But that’s probably because, contrary to popular belief, I am massively frigid and my internal organs contract even when just furtively beginning to think about logistics.

He says early on, “From this moment on, you will do everything I tell you to do”. What a lovely snuggly thing. I just hope she’s not on an off day or they haven’t broken-up from final edit to publication. He waxes lyrical about her having a good cum face. He says that most women have no sense of obvious abandonment, but that she – the woman he loves – betrays her cum face all the time during everyday non-sexual activities, such as looking around, eating penne and mountain biking.

Eventually he tells her and everyone else reading Le Monde to go to the bar car and buy a drink (either coffee or mineral water) and look around. This is supposed to be crackingly good bonk material, because obviously loads of people will be looking at each other wondering who SHE actually is, imagining the scores of knickers doing the breaststroke and all those hard-ons knock knock knocking against nylon.

Finally, he describes another woman who goes to the nearest toilet to masturbate. He describes her watching her own fingers disappear into her pussy in the mirror as she steadies herself (train movements as opposed to the thrashes of orgasm). The final few paragraphs I find terribly boring – he doesn’t describe the state of the toilet – which I think is a crucial detail. His description of this other woman wanking is so bloody boring that it near on shuts off the whole grid.

He climaxes with her almost crying out in ecstasy – desperate to shout YES, but afraid that the other people waiting for a shit and/or wank might hear. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I can barely type: disappointment. This is definitely not sexual fantasy material. I’m just spit balling here, but if this was my fantasy I would at least have her flooding the cubicle and then being plunged by the guard before you can say “look before you alight”.

Overall conclusion: 8 out of 10.

Titillation station: It did buckle my tracks for a bit. Mainly the first few station stops. Gets really boring towards the end, basically because the train slows down rather than speeds up. So I just got up and cleaned my oven, which I had been meaning to do for ages.

Food for thought: I think this dude might have been so worried about careering over that fine line between misogyny and fantasy, perineum and anus, that he fucking bottled it. It’s a real shame as it could have been the erotic equivalent of the Lake District (around number twelve of the seven wonders of the world). It’s also a shame that he more of less ignores everyone else on the train except the hot women. He’s waiting for her on the platform at the end – 100% confident that she has already gotten off.

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The Raunch Review: Book 5

Violet Malice

Violet Malice has been bogged down with another paper based diet of erotica this week. She has found herself beating faster than usual and necking fluid from the cold tap. Dedicated to finding a bedtime read that blows the windows out and requires at least two fire engines to battle the blazing mons pubis. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that dank and seedy question: can a good book ever be as honest as a good fuck?

Happiness Bastard
Happiness Bastard by Kirby Doyle

Book title: Happiness Bastard
Author: Kirby Doyle
First published: 1968

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: Poet Kirby Doyle’s only published novel is a stream of consciousness, much like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Written on one massive piece of paper formed of lots of normal sized pieces of paper taped together. Obviously, the published version has pages – what a bore! According to the author the book was written on a trip that “my lover post-wife and I took to New York in 1959-1960.” Kirby is, one can only assume, the narrator Tully McSwine and his girlfriend is Dolly, who is needless to say always up for it. It goes without saying that the book is very ‘Beat Generation’ so very hard to follow, there’s no real plot line and the writing certainly reflects Kirby’s own struggle around that time with drug addiction, poverty and unhappy affairs of the ticker.

Front cover: Not the original printing by Essex House sadly. A really rubbish modern edition (2020) that looks like someone/Amazon has faxed it to Pluto and then it’s been photocopied and run over by a lorry full of shit. The front and back photos of the author are so grainy you have to be about two miles away for the pixels to come together.

Title: Bloody fantastic! A massive fan of the word bastard, both visually and orally. Swear words in titles are not utilised enough in my humble opinion. Much like my previous thoughts on Bondage Trash from last week, the two words Happiness Bastard writhe against each other. Kick each other in the bollocks. Like a bleach blonde oxymoron trying to get it on with Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Best two-word phrase/s in the book: A few to get you going:

liberal sphincter, sex heads, fat rubber, cellophaned taste, clinical pornography, genital windows, padlocked vagina, punctured prostitute, sadist cocksmen, gummy wad, electric paralysis, skin mag, urinatory fashion.

Best dialogue in the book: Like holding a mirror up to the queue in Greggs:

“Love! Ha, ha, love! I like that! Love my ass, you bastard! Why all you know of love is that it makes you twitch between your legs! Don’t talk to me of love, you walking erection!” 

“I told this idiot that I couldn’t bear it when they airbrushed the cunt away in these skin mags, and he said it wasn’t airbrushed, only shaved and her cunt was too far under to see the slit. What kind of crap is that, I ask you? Makes me wonder if this infant has ever seen a twat at all. Ha!” 

Phoning me in the middle of one icy winter afternoon to ask, “Have you any idea what Kitty’s doing right now?” and I, fearful of his hysteria and bewildered, answering, “No, what’s she doing now?” and he, like an over-intelligent schoolboy hot with the answer, “Sucking my cock, you son of a bitch… goodbye.”

“How would you like to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut?”

“I masturbate everyday. Eef I am eating a meal at night and remember that I have not masturbated I will stop my eating and masturbate then.”

Best sentence/s in the book: Some real meat on the bones here:

Dolly was the proud possessor of a remarkably elastic cunt, especially if the engagement was a particularly heated one (that is, when I was at my best). 

All of them a bunch of sexual cripples, which they will sternly prove by fucking at the drop of a political sympathy. 

Sliding the fingers of both hands into her cunt, which by this time was as easy as sliding into a bathtub full of vaseline, I could, by pulling the lips away from each other even more than the mechanics of her vaginal excitement had already done (as if I were trying to invert it), stretch her snatch out to an expansion where I could fit it over my face from eyebrows to chin like a hot meaty mask, and were it only detachable I could have marched in the Halloween parade. 

When this seismic phenomenon threatened to scatter her in bloody bits and pieces about the room I slipped my forefinger into her ass and rammed it to the knuckle… O Good Ladies and Gentle Men, need I tell you that she came neigh unto shitting all over me? 

Prance she would and tend to domestic trivialities nakedly… cook a full meal in the raw… breasts dangling over the bubbling spaghetti… the cruel lewdness of her pubic hairs level with the salad… while with a feigned tone of “modern liberality” she threw out maddening little comments: “I so think it’s wonderful not wearing clothes… so free… let the air into every little pore… so much more natural, don’t you think?” then turn and show me her buttocks as she bent to the bottom rack of the refrigerator seeking vegetables. 

She kept what she liked to think of as a secret list of ex-lovers that she sadly enjoyed showing only to people with whom she stoutly refused (I suspect out of fear of making her come) to go to bed with, like me. 

Had an applesauce sandwich for breakfast and a glass of wine too; great, cheap, vinegary wino-type wine that when you puke comes bubbl’n out yer nose and stings a bit. 

I’m not finished yet: Obviously poets make the best writers:

Dolly turned to him and milked a little snake juice from the tits of her tongue. 

A cock in the hand is worth two in the bush.

I sodomised the landlady’s cat in lieu of rent… she got her thing out of it… the landlady… not the cat…

I’ve not had such a good time since dear dead Grandma used to puke on the linoleum and let us kids skate in it. 

The girls were all very homely and intellectually aggressive in a vacuum-packed sort of a way. 

The party was boiling when we arrived, strange-looking people bulging from the windows. 

My belated old grey-haired muff of a mother used to have a in tomb in her womb. My daddy told me so. 

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Sexual content: It’s not really a sex book per say. Essex House came forward to publish it because no one else would take it on apparently. As such the sex is there but it’s not the main cut and thrust as it were. That aside, the descriptions of sex are funny rather than titillating, which is equally as enjoyable. Sex after all, should be great fun.

Given the desperate nature of the book – the drug abuse and poverty – the tone is hard and bitter tasting but jovial. The sex is tainted by an explicit hatred of women, which sees our frustrated and angry narrator sing the praises of masturbation over sexual intercourse. And later on we find him insisting that the sex will be better because he’s full of hatred. Our unhappy narrator also very much enjoys dressing women up as helplessly insatiable cum sluts. The guy is just down on life – but thankfully whilst he’s down there…

Overall conclusion: 5 out of 10.

Titillation station: Absolutely nothing stirring in the bushes. No foxes. No dogs. Not even a cormorant in a Mackintosh pushing blue marbles into a towel.

Food for thought: Shame about the writing style – stream of consciousness is a big turn off for me. It feels as though it’s close to greatness, mainly because poets that write novels understand the importance of a well crafted image, but sadly it gets lost in all the chaos and sloppy Giuseppe. The book wrestles with language – and kicks against the everyday detritus/injustice/loneliness of life – there’s a beauty in that.

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Violet Malice

Suck It and See