"The numbness bleeds into Charlie's vision. He sees everything through the veil of a dream. The widening black between the streetlights, the silent strangers alongside him looking out into the dark. They're kids - just kids. He doesn't understand, and he never will. The boys still won't meet each other's eyes. They're afraid, both of them, of what they might see."

Oh, how I shall never tire of toxic, terrible people and their obsessions with each other. How I shall never tire of the most pretentious, unbearable, violent and torturous tales of queer love. In an age where the phrase has lost all meaning, These Violent Delights is a shining example of how one correctly enthralls readers with Dark Academia. Steeped in utterly gorgeous prose and philosophical musings, this is a real delight of a novel. It's one of those soul-shattering novels of bliss, drenched in poignancy and danger. As delightful as it is deranged, as unhinged as it is tender and intimate, These Violent Delights feels like a deeply personal novel. It's an intense, all-consuming experience, enrapturing and blissful.

This is a debut novel. It's a debut. Let that truly sink in, as a debut of this caliber is a real rarity. There's such a vast maturity and confidence to the prose, one that's almost impossible to find in other, similar works of fiction. These Violent Delights is a demanding novel, requiring unwavering attention from its reader. So harshly captivating and intensely beautiful, it's absolutely excruciating how amazing, how fantastic of a book this really is. It's crushing, captivating, bewitching, it's messy and twisted and all so chaotic. This is a spiraling intoxicating pit of darkness and despair in print form.

 

It's a novel of subtle cruelties that are woven into a slowly unfurling text. Obsessive love blurs into hurt and suffering lurks around every corner. It's a novel of broken, horrible, twisted, god awful people. Both Paul and Julian are hardly ever likable, in fact, they spend most of their story being abhorrent, detestable people. Yet, so fantastically are they captured upon the page that it's impossible not to read on. These Violent Delights is a story of violent obsession, of unreliable narration and unending savagery. Nothing here is healthy, or right, or good in any way, but my god, is it the most exhilarating thing. As a book, it's all so raw and real and human, it absolutely guts the reader. It's a wickedly beautiful thing, a slow building, hyper destructive apocalypse of a novel.

"He had no words left in his head, no ideas. He barely thought about Julian at all. All he could think about was throwing himself against a wall, over and over, until he'd smashed himself into shards so fine that the void inside him could finally slip free."