Poisoning Eros

Three stars and that’s being generous.

Poisoning Eros is for lovers of continuous rape, gore, torture, brutality and mind-bending pornography. It tries really hard to be terrifying but often comes across as ridiculous.

So how do I really feel 🙉?

What’s the colour of earth, or for that matter, the colour of faeces? Brown. When you compact waste it loses its colour and becomes that earthy shade. In effect, no colour at all. There is so much gore, brutality and beastiality recklessly thrown at you non-stop it fails to shock and no longer has any impact as your brain becomes desensitised. We associate death with blackness, hell with furious red, but Poisoning Eros is the colour of compacted brown. Some people call this chaos theory, the idea that if we throw enough shit at the fan it will all work out in the end. It’s more like catapulting severed heads over battlements in the hope of shock effect.

Once we go down to hell, any semblance of plausibility goes out the window. If literature is well written (this is not) authors can get away with practically anything, even writing about tin-can alley backwoods or mundane events. Here we get the most extreme scenarios but no real tension. Just stomping on Gloria! Tension usually comes from a gradual buildup and the psychological expectancy that comes from that, followed by release. The only tension this book creates is by putting it down and taking a break, and then picking it up again after a reset. Like emptying out the trash.

To give the book credit, it’s an exciting page turner at times to see how increasingly sordid it can become. It’s also quite funny and ridiculous, approaching subjects you could never imagine in your worst nightmares. There's also a sense of possible redemption and revenge in the hope that Gloria can kick ass and get some payback for what she’s been/going through. It's fast paced while flaying your brain into submission. Like masturbating until your genitals drop off.

It's also a good reminder never to bother with The 120 Days of Sodom, just as I got bored and struggled with Hogg by Samuel R. Delany, when there’s nothing more you can throw at the reader but hundreds of pages of someone else's sodomised world of defecating and ass fisting.

Unfortunately, the definitions of heaven and hell are cliched stereotypes of biblical proportions. I don't need pseudo-religious instruction on another person's version of good vs evil - I can get that from Lord of The Rings. It's corny, trite, overbearing and sometimes patronising, while feeling creepily intrusive and assumptive on the morals of right or wrong.

It’s loosely written, a bit cheesy and often repetitive, too extreme because it assumes too much, gives no breathing room and never lets off the gas, and therefore with no real tension. But anything that gets you worked up enough is a kind of success, right?

And extra merit for allowing me to vent off at the hideous world we live in, at the superficial people living just for appearances. For reminding me that the world can easily become a hateful place if you make bad decisions or let it slip too much. For reminding me of the pitfalls of class-A drug abuse, about the terrors of getting old in the porn industry when no one wants your services anymore.

This book was an amazing opportunity for a riches to rags story on the porn industry, including the pros and cons of living in that environment over decades, so we can better understand the depravity and disappointment when the glamour finally wears off. Instead, we get thrust into burning hell as it becomes OTT and comical - chapters and chapters of it.

I had a laugh writing this review, though.