Literature

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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 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 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 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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Violet Malice

Suck It and See