Normal
In all honesty I'm a bit underwhelmed by this book. While the premise was interesting, I feared that a story about a serial killer who grows an empathy muscle and falls in love was a big ask. And I was right. My concerns are as follows. The dialogue between the main character and Erica had the mundane intimacy of a bickering married couple, which was disturbing given the subject matter.
And then there were the hints of Erica being as bad if not worse than the main character, so we have a victim who deserves her treatment.
If I was to just maintain suspension of disbelief and view it as a piece of entertaining literature sans any meaningful exploration of violence in society, well it just feels dirty reading another story about women being hunted and killed, even if the violence isn't as explicit as one would expect in a book about a serial killer. On the other hand the banality of its depiction could almost be viewed as a lens through which the violence is normalised.
Furthermore, in order to successfully maintain suspension of disbelief there needs to be plausibility to the story, which there isn't.
For me, the writing was only average, making it difficult to stick with at times. At least there wasn't a neat happy ending to the story, so I guess that's a redeeming feature. But unfortunately there weren't enough of these to overcome the above misgivings I have for me to recommend this book as a good read.
But then again, perhaps a neat happy ending where two sociopathic individuals find each other and live happily ever after in a perverse domestic bliss is actually the full blown absurdity this story needed.
