Full Brutal

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Five words: The Part About the Crimes. Okay, a few more: the Part About the Crimes is the gruesome heart of 2666, the outpouring of blood without which none of the rest would exist. It recounts the individual murders of 112 women in Santa Teresa over the course of only a few years. It is fairly difficult to get through, which, I suppose, is part of the point. Kim is not your average teen-aged girl. Her life can been summed up in two words: Numb indifference. But, yeah, this book is not for everyone. It is extreme horror and by extreme I mean extremely gross and violent. Prepare thyself. This book will not be for everyone but it was definitely for me. It managed to take my mind off of the current hellish timeline we’re caught up in and thrust me into someone else's for a few hours. Criminals, in general, are often the last person you would expect. So I enjoy Triana’s main psychopathic character being a popular, high school cheerleader. She commits all of these atrocities and no one suspects it was her. The best part? Others get framed.

When Kim finds out she’s pregnant with her teacher’s child, a new madness overtakes her, and she realizes there’s only one thing that will satisfy her baby’s hunger . . . Violence isn’t typically this Murakami’s style—he’s more a magical ears and talking cats kind of guy, but if you’ve read this novel, you know exactly what I’m talking about: a single scene in an otherwise nonviolent novel that is so viscerally upsetting that anyone who reads it is unlikely to forget. It begins like this: “His men held Yamamoto down with their hands and knees while he began skinning Yamamoto with the utmost care. It truly was like skinning a peach.” One part Heathers and Mean Girls, another part Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer, Kristopher Triana’s Full Brutal lives up to its title in the juiciest, goriest way imaginable. It’s a deep plunge into madness and murderous frenzy for the pure hell of it. At the same time, it is intricately clever in the way it delivers its carefully calculated doses of eye-popping brutality. Full Brutal is a damn good hardcore horror novel.”Full Brutal is Splatterpunk gold. It delivered exactly what it intended. There are no limits in this story. Nothing is out of bounds. I have never curled my toes so tightly and had my stomach churn so violently whilst reading. The problem is (well, aside from all the moral issues, that is), Kim isn't content with just sleeping with Mr. Blakley. The act itself offers very little satisfaction. She finds, rather, that she is stimulated by his subsequent remorse and anguish. She realizes that her happiness depends on watching others suffer. She decides "...to play an intricate role in his self-destruction." The dialogue is good, the characters–especially Kim–are very well drawn and believable, the pacing is excellent, and it delivers in exactly the way you’d want an extreme horror novel to do: in dripping–and apparently delicious–chunks. There’s a good reason this gem won the 2019 Splatterpunk award. It earned it. But Kim is bored by it all. The whole high school experience. Even her best friend, Amy, has become practically unbearable. Kim's not sure how much more she can take. What even is the point?

Speravo con tutta me stessa che non fosse una delusione e per fortuna non lo è stata. Anzi. Ho amato ogni singola parola e credo che sia il libro che ho "linguettato" di più!

The world seemed just as stale and empty as always, and the misery of the sunshine as it poured through the blinds of [her] bedroom window made [her] groan with discontent." It is improbable that a sixteen-year-old girl could pull off so much cold-blooded murder, body mutilation, evisceration, cannibalism, autosarcophagy, and torture (both physical and mental), but Triana’s rapid-fire, explicit, and vividly realistic writing is such that readers are likely not to give that much thought—wondering, instead, what is going to happen next. Likewise, Triana does not provide a lot of detailed insight into Kim’s motivation other than the satisfaction her despicable actions provide her. Ironically, when Kim reflects upon herself, she usually sees a victim or someone who is tremendously proud of her intellect and machinations; her ability to control and affect the lives of others. She is a flesh-eating disease, a serpentine monster out of control for whom “hurting people is an art” to be “enjoyed”—a monster the likes of which today’s society often sees reflected in “mass shooters and suicide bombers.” Ironically, at one-point Kim, who is the first-person narrator of the story, comments, serial killers “aren’t in the news much anymore. We have new monsters,” but the serial killers are “still out there.” It's twisted, deranged and I enjoyed how it sort of flipped the script on the sex-violence connection. After Kim discovers her attraction to torture porn, her imagination runs wild and she'll stop at nothing to reach new levels of euphoria. Kim is a beautiful and popular 16-year-old cheerleader with suicidal thoughts and a general pessimism for life in general. She wants something new to change her perspective, to make her feel alive, and she decides that based on what her friends have been telling her, sex is the answer. But sex alone isn’t enough for Kim, who likes to set herself apart. Instead, she sets her sights on her sex-ed teacher and finds him all-too-willing after a few gentle nudges. Another case of fantasized violence (well, maybe—the novel is rather less clear about this than the film, but the popularity of the film has now passed the fact that it’s all in Bateman’s head into canon), but intensely detailed. First it’s just run-of-the-mill murder from a run-of-the-mill disaffected yuppie, but as the book goes on, it gets more and more horrible, with Bateman pretty much trying everything you might try with a human body, dead or alive. Yes, that. That too. The scene of Bateman eating the body of a dead girl, trying to cook with her flesh but finding it too hard because he really can’t cook and so instead smearing it all over the walls, and admitting that “though it does sporadically penetrate how unacceptable some of what I’m doing actually is, I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing, is shit, and along with a Xanax (which I am now taking half-hourly) this thought momentarily calms me and then I’m humming, humming the theme to a show I watched often as a child— The Jetsons? The Banana Splits? Scooby Doo? Sigmund and the Sea Monsters?” Ugh.

Non c'è un attimo di tregua, una montagna russa che ti contorce le budella, ti nausea e ti spappola al sedile.This book will not be for everyone but it was definitely for me. It managed to take my mind off of the current nightmarish timeline we’re caught up in and thrust me into someone else's for a few hours. As you can guess, I love stories that feature female killers. Hello, have you read Dissecting House? Now, more psychopathic female murderers are starting to become more popular as opposed to women killing in revenge horror, which is where we previously saw most female killers in horror. I absolutely love this trend, so I’m always on the hunt for a good crazy female serial killer story. Kim's relationship with her father, her big ole house, the fact that she didn't vibe with high school boys was total Cher, if Cher had been a psychotic bitch hell bent on destroying everyone around her. Allucinante è dire poco, non sono facilmente impressionabile, ma cazzo, Triana non ci gira intorno nemmeno un po' alle cose.