How come? The sheer awfulness of Johansen stunned us....endless pages of redundant overwritten, soap opera-like dialogue that made our eyes cross. ....we couldn't comprehend a thriller where all the characters sit around blabbing like " Days Of Our Lives" denizens mulling over their problems at the coffee shop.
But like Slaughter, Iris Johansen sells millions of books, so what do we know? Well, just like paintings, we know what we like. Sorry to say......the terrible experience of plowing through the Johansen book may have sub-consciously continued to push us away from Slaughter......until we lost our Slaughter virginity with her best seller from last year, "Pretty Girls"......
While reading this gore-drenched horrorshow in which abducted young girls are tortured and hacked apart with a machete, we recalled the disgust and outrage that surrounded Eli Roth's two "Hostel" films. Roth's unapologetic depictions of women tortured for the sheer thrill of it (and the inevitable imitations) coined the the phrase 'torture porn'. There was no other purpose to the Roth films and the entire "Saw" series than to serve up the sight of human beings in agony for entertainment.......
That begs the question......is there any difference between movie torture-porn and Slaughter's book? Both feature lengthy sequences of unspeakable, unimaginable violence committed against innocent women. In fact, Slaughter's detailed descriptions of the anatomical damage wreaked on the book's victims exceed anything Eli Roth's make up staff could come up with. In this case, the pen is bloodier than the sword.
But there is a difference.......Slaughter writes with empathy for the victims. (In movie torture-porn, that's non-existent. Victims are stick figures meant to die horribly to give us our jollies....) Like all skilled thriller writers, Slaughter understands you have to care for, to worry over, and to fear for the safety and lives of sympathetic characters put in harm's way. Otherwise you wouldn't spend all night furiously flipping the pages to see what happens to them next. And going one step further, she breaks your heart with the diary entries of a father who has never given up on the search for his abducted daughter.
Slaughter's plot and its far-fetched structure are, however, open to debate. Simply put, it's a painful account of a horrendously unlucky family whose three sisters are preyed upon and victimized by a monstrous split personality scumbag. You'll have to swallow the idea of this hellhound having quite an efficient infrastructure........he videotapes his torture-murders, marketing his snuff films to a worldwide network of like-minded soulless deviates. A jumbo twist halfway through the book reveals the identity of this loathsome creature, but that's relatively unimportant. What counts the most here......the book's second half, a traditional ticking clock cat-and-mouse countdown between predator and prey. And when Slaughter reaches her ultimate showdown between the two, you can bet she leaves no bones unshattered and no veins unopened.....
You'll have to decide for yourself whether Slaughter's aching pity for her victims and passionate affection for her heroines justifies the book's continuous onslaught of ghastly atrocities. If you haven't figured it out already from this post, know this: do not go anywhere near this book if you're not able to stomach its epic levels of misogynistic violence......it ain't for sissies. If you do jump on Slaughter's Halloween funhouse rollercoaster, she'll suck you in allright. You'll tear through the final pages into the middle of the night.......but some of you may experience a morning-after assessment......was that entertainment or what?
Moral questions aside, judging "Pretty Girls" as a thriller, we'll bleed out 3 stars (***)....but the BQ urges caution. Know what you're getting into.......
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