She lives in a tall, lonely tower block, obsessed with the local drug dealer and his gym-built muscles. He’s called Tony, and she knows that because her neighbour Miriam shouts it several times a night, in the throes of passion. Our protagonist gets in the lift with him at one point, and hopes to be propositioned if not ravished, but he just asks if she wants to buy some drugs. She seems to assume that any man looking at her does so with sexual interest, and perhaps her sleazy anime fan boss is, but he’s not what she’s after.
The book is told in the first person in a hard-boiled style, which, paired with a female protagonist, reminded me a bit of Christa Faust’s excellent novel Money Shot. But whereas Money Shot wastes not a moment getting to the story – the first paragraph finds Angel Dare left for dead in a car boot! – for the first quarter of this book, it’s not at all clear what this story will be. We follow the narrator on her daily routine, and, though we gain some insight into her frame of mind, nothing of note actually happens.
Then she tells us how much she hates her neighbour, and the doorbell rings, and it’s Tony, and by the halfway point our protagonist has decided to kill her neighbour. To be fair, she doesn’t attack first, but the third quarter of the book is one long, brutal, lovingly-described fight between two women, with punching, gouging, scratching and stamping, the last described in particularly stomach-churning ways. This fight is clearly the book’s main attraction, but I can’t say I got much out of reading it. Despite the cover, there’s no supernatural or fantastical element, it’s just a long and nasty fight.
If this is a horror book, it’s only in the sense that any violent crime is horrific. It’s very bloody, but there’s not much of a story. No twists, no revelations, just senseless violence, and then a bit more senseless violence. Perhaps reading all seven novellas would see them build up to more, but I wasn’t quite impressed enough to read further. Quite a lot of errors and typos for such a short book didn’t help (e.g. disinterested for uninterested, stalagmite for stalactite, and more than one “lay” for “lie”, which is becoming so common that I’m beginning to doubt myself).
Maybe this is one of those times where I persuaded myself that something rather more interesting was going to happen and, because it didn’t, I felt that the book had let me down. Given the book’s reticence about its lead, I was expecting a Tyke Tiler twist, which would have made the envy of the title even more delusional than the reader originally thought. Of course it’s unfair to blame a book for not doing what you expected: the problem is, it didn’t do anything else instead. It just shows you a woman being killed in a very nasty way. **
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