If you’re after a relaxed, cosy read, you’d be better off steering clear of Kiss It Away. Steroid addict Nick rapes a man he finds wandering in a Salisbury park. He then murders a woman soon after. But the police photofit is of Ben, who was attacked. And his strange behaviour with girlfriend Dawn soon sets her wondering about him.
This book definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted. It’s an explicit, brutal look at male rape and steroid abuse. Davis’s main strength is her cool, dispassionate prose which keeps you turning the pages. The chapters with Nick are powerful reading, as you are sucked into his amoral, warped world and his increasing desperation for money and steroids.
avis has also created a raft of convincing characters around Nick. Most compelling of these is Dawn, some years older than Ben, and drifting a little after the end of her marriage to Richard. She’s working in a post office whilst trying to make money from her art. But she still sees Richard often, as she provides illustrations for his magazine. Richard, though, is having a mid-life crisis and an affair with bimbo 20-something Rachel.
But where Dawn feels real and well rounded, the character of Ben is much more patchy and he ends up seeming like a plot device. The snag here is that Davis moves the point of view around a lot between chapters, and we just never seem to be with Ben often enough.
The book has several flaws that I found immensely annoying. There’s some lousy editing – typos, repetition and a highly confusing bit where Nick’s drunken landlord Yurek goes off to the pub with a couple named Con and Betsy, who then reappear some chapters down the line as if for the first time. And I really don’t understand why every character in small-town Wiltshire (where I used to live!) uses the very American ‘gotten’. Not only does it jar, it’s also highly unlikely.
I also had doubts about Ben’s internet search on male rape that turns up a host of porn sites and nothing in the way of valid information to help him. I did some research on male rape a while ago – and repeated the search after reading the book – and found perfectly relevant and useful sites immediately.
So this is a tricky book to recommend. But it’s one that needed to be written
on a topic that gets nowhere near enough understanding.
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Sharon Wheeler
Other books by Carol Anne Davis are Shrouded, Safe as Houses, Noise Abatement
and her true crime books Women Who Kill and Children Who Kill.
To lean more about Carol Ann, viist her web site at
http://wwwtellitlikeitis.demon.co.uk