New Animal by Ella Baxter

New Animal piqued my interest as it had a mix of all the dark things I look for in a book. By the time I’d read the first few chapters, I knew that Ella Baxter has quite a way with words. 

Set in Australia and Tasmania, a setting that I very much enjoy, I was instantly transported into the life of Amelia and felt I could relate to her in ways that surprised me. 

She’s an intelligent woman who instead of dwelling on all the sadness and confusion her life throws at her, she decides to deal with her grief by leaving her job/home/family and crashes straight into the BDSM scene. 

Death in the family? Deal with it by going to a fetish club. Why not?! Who says there’s a right or wrong way to do these things. 

However, New Animal isn’t a story about the kinky sex life of a woman who’s going off the rails. It’s about coping and not coping. Sometimes it takes a trauma in life to set people off on a journey in order to get their head together.

I flew through this at quite a speed, the writing style had a grip on me more than the story itself. The descriptions were so vivid. 

There are definitely scenes in this book that would be triggering for some. It’s crass, violent, and at times, brutal. One scene made me cringe and that is a rarity for me! I love to push the boundaries though, give me all the reading-feels, even the uncomfortable ones! 

Overall, New Animal was a dark and very well written story. It won’t be for everyone, but Ella Baxter and her New Animal has given me something to think about. 

Recommended for people who can appreciate that human nature can be an off-kilter thing and for those who don’t mind feeling just a tiny bit disgusted by stuff humans do to each other. 

Out 17 February 2022

Ella Baxter is a writer and artist living in Melbourne, Australia.

Top Ten Tuesday [Twisted and Questionable Edition 18+]

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created over at 👉 The Broke and the Bookish.👈

Go check out their blog when you’ve got a minute, it’s fabulous!

For my Top Ten Tuesday post I’m going to list some of my most twisted and disturbing reads that I have come across over the years. There’s a few different genres here, ranging from horror and erotica, to crime and religion. It’s quite a mixed bag, but please BE WARNED, THESE BOOKS ARE NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART OR THE EASILY OFFENDED!!

(Click on the pics to take you to their Goodreads pages!)

The Dark by James Herbert

My first EVER horror book. I was 13 years old and utterly blown away by this. (As were many of the characters in the book, but in a VERY different way!)

The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey 

This book is strangely mesmerising! LaVey’s ideology was the perfect partner back in the day when I’d first discovered Black Sabbath, Slayer and Megadeth! It was THE go-to book for us metal-heads at school circa 1988. Not only is it pretty controversial, we also had it confiscated so many times by the deputy head! Oh Mr Ellis, you were such a spoil sport!

Public Disgrace at the Club by La Marchesa

Ok, this really is a dirty little book. At 39 pages this Kindle smut was outrageous! It was free, I was bored, and I’m not at all embarrassed by my choice of short story. Although I couldn’t read it in public, that would be a disgrace. Obviously. Next….

Sweetpea by C J Skuse

Oh how I love you my Sweetpea, one of my best of 2017. (Sounds like I’m starting an ode….) It’s offensive, sweary, bloody, violent and genius. Read it. That’s an order!

Cold Calling by Haydn Wilks

This is just so wrong on so many levels.  I gave it a 4 star review. Pretty sick stuff!

 

 

 

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

Deranged isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

See also : Barmy
See also : Genius

The Book of Paul by Richard Long

I have never read ANYTHING like this and I don’t think I ever will again. This is possibly the most intelligently grotesque horror story I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on. I can’t unsee some of the scenes, absolutely not for the squeamish. A five star book.

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

Poignant, candid, and so brutal. This one was my first ever book written by a Japanese author. It certainly opened my eyes! I’d love to visit Tokyo, and thankfully, reading this hasn’t put me off!

 

 

Wind Up Toy by David Owain Hughes

A quote from my Goodreads review says enough about this one really;

“I need to clean my thoughts with an electric sander and brush my tongue with Colgate mixed with hydrochloric acid. Although I do rather like this bad taste.” 

I gave it 4.5 stars! I guess I’m a bit twisted and questionable sometimes! 😂

 

Captive in the Dark by C J Roberts

A very dark erotica with a very disturbing subject. I was testing some reading boundaries with this one. Although it had abuse, kidnapping and sexual violence as it’s main subject, it was incredibly well written, but I don’t think I’d want to read anything like this again.

 

 

Well, there we have it! My Top Ten Tuesday with a twist and leaving you with questions perhaps! (This girl reads some weird shit, I know!) When it comes to books, I like to test those bookworm boundaries, after all, wouldn’t it be boring if we all just read Harry Potter and fluffy romance. (I’ve not read HP or fluff, just for the record.)

Thanks so much for stopping by, and tell me, IN CONFIDENCE what your twisted reads are in the comments below. I won’t tell a soul. Promise. 😉

Shadowland by Radclyffe

Shadowland by Radclyffe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Quite a few years ago now, when I got my hands on my first Kindle, I went on a free-book rampage. I’d not long been a member of GR, but I was loving my newly found access to loads of free books and adding them to my (very small at the time!) TBR shelf. Now, I’ll own up, a LOT of them were Kindle-smut! I’d discovered that a lot of freebies, ironically, came at a price, being that 80%+ of them were utter rubbish!! But, occasionally, there was a diamond in the rough, and Shadowland by Radclyffe was one of them.

After recently reading many thrillers, horrors, historical fic, etc, etc, I wanted to read something completely different. So I hunted through my Kindle and decided to read this, and it hooked me in, handcuffed my attention to the bed, and promptly impressed the hell out of me!

Shadowland, in a nutshell, is a complex story about a group of gay women who have more baggage, secrets, flaws, and attitude than ANY bunch of characters I’ve ever read about. Radclyffe has written the most brilliant character-focused story I’ve come across in a long, long time. I don’t read much at all in the LGBT fiction genre, but the character dynamics are first class. Having no men around makes for an absolute knock-out read! Even the women don’t understand the women, so I don’t think men have much hope, that’s for sure!

Now, onto the more gritty side of things.

Trigger warning, a BIG part of this story evolves around, some might say, unconventional lifestyles. In that there’s BDSM, total power exchange (TPE), D/s (Domme/sub) relationships and leather, lots of leather 😉 There is also mind-games, occasional drug use, edge play and a variety of sex toys that inflict both pleasure and pain. So if you’re after a cute lesbian romance, this book isn’t for you. However, if you’ve got an open mind and just fancy reading something a little darker, without that typical ‘alpha male’ throwing his weight around, choose this, there’s ‘alpha females’ instead. How refreshing!

So, going back to the smut side of things, this one stands right out from the crowd. The author didn’t feel the need to use profanity hardly at all. The sex scenes are erotic and loving, with very little essence of titillation for titillations sake, just the right amount of description to set the scene and paint the picture bold enough for the reader to capture the imagery perfectly.

When a plot is this good, when the characters are this strong and when the writing has such flow, I’m completely sold. This is NOT smut. Or pointless, crass sexploits purely written to get the reader ‘off’! This is a great character driven story by a brilliant author.

I really can’t fault it. My only disappointment is that none of Radclyffes other books are free!!

View all my reviews