these violent delights micah nemerever review

Micah Nemerever's debut is a beautiful portrait of intimacy, desperation, and the damage that damaged hearts can cause. 'As unsettling as it is enthralling, These Violent Delights will engulf you: first in the intoxication of obsession, then in its toxic consequences. Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.Īs their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence.

Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal-an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. The Secret History meets Lie with Me in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel-a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence. A Paperback Paris Best New LGBTQ+ Books To Read This Year Selection.An Electric Lit Most Anticipated Debut.An O LGBTQ Books That Are Changing the Literary Landscape.A Philadelphia Inquirer 10 Big Books for the Fall.

These violent delights micah nemerever review