In the cut

Review by New York Times Review

Authors recommend the books that caused them to lose sleep at night. The scariest book I've ever read is the haunting of hill house, by Shirley Jackson. I read it one night next to my sleeping wife and found myself unable to move, unable to go to bed, unable to do anything except keep reading and praying the shadows around me didn't move. - CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of "Her Body and Other Parties" I never really recovered from the collector, by John Fowles, a work of shattering brilliance and unbearable suspense - as well as the clear inspiration for "The Silence of the Lambs." "The Collector" presents the reader with a pair of unforgettable adversaries, locked in a desperate yet restrained struggle: Frederick Clegg, the introverted kidnapper, and Miranda Grey, his prisoner. Writing before the F.B.I. created its criminal profiling unit - before the term "serial killer" had even been coined - Fowles was there, methodically exploring the reasoning of humanity's most terrifying predators. - JOE HILL, author of "Strange Weather" I remember it - 13 years old, in the suburban security of a life I took for granted, oliver twist snatched all of that away, when the boy was stripped of everything and left alone. I agonized over questions I never agonized over before. What if everyone died, leaving me alone? Adults were selfish and brutal, and in the case of Bill Sikes, evil incarnate. Sikes scared me right down to the bone and still haunts my dreams. I got goose bumps just typing this. - MARLON JAMES, author of "A Brief History of Seven Killings" The books that have profoundly scared me when I read them - made me want to sleep with the light on, made the neck hairs prickle and the goose bumps march, are few: Henry James's "The Ttirn of the Screw," Peter Straub's "Ghost Story," Stephen King's "It" and "'Salem's Lot" and "The Shining" all scared me silly, and transformed the night into a most dangerous place. But Shirley Jackson's the haunting of hill house beats them all: a maleficent house, real human protagonists, everything half-seen or happening in the dark. It scared me as a teenager and it haunts me still, as does Eleanor, the girl who comes to stay. - NEIL GAIMAN, author of "Norse Mythology" PET SEMATARY, by Stephen King. I got it as a gift when I was 11 or 12.1 remember being so scared reading it that I threw the book away from me as if it were a poisonous insect. For the first time I felt a physical sensation with literature. It's so dark, so brutal. It's also very scary: the utter hopelessness, the way King just doesn't offer any relief. - MARIANA ENRIQUEZ, author of "Things We Lost in the Fire" In the fall of 2001,1 was working by myself on a weekend afternoon at a mystery bookstore in Greenwich Village. Traffic was slow and I had some downtime to read Sara Gran's come closer, which one of the bookstore's co-owners recommended highly. I generally shy away from horror - gore on film doesn't do it for me, and my imagination runs wild with the print versions - but once I began Gran's novel, about a young woman named Amanda who begins to behave in strange, inexplicable ways, I could not stop until I reached the very last line: "And that's all I've ever wanted, really: someone to love me, and never leave me alone." A common wish transformed into monstrous deed made me shiver in fear, a feeling that persisted until the end of my store shift, and in the years thereafter. - SARAH WEINMAN, author of "The Real Lolita" The scariest book I've read in a long time is A REAPER AT the games, by Sabaa Tahir. Though it has terrifying, fantastical monsters (picture the kind of face that would earn the name "Nightbringer"), the scariest part of this book for me comes in a hauntingly visceral portrayal of domestic abuse. Some scenes were so terrifying and hard to read I became physically nauseated! - TOMI ADEYEMI, author of "Children of Blood and Bone" Possibly the scariest book I've ever read was Richard Preston's nonfiction thriller the hot zone, about outbreaks of the Ebola virus and the efforts to identify and contain that sort of hemorrhagic fever. I like Stephen King's comment that he read "The Hot Zone" between his splayed fingers. There are times when the simple listing of factual events can be more frightening than even the best works of imagination a novelist can concoct - although Shirley Jackson's classic "The Haunting of Hill House" comes in a very close second to "The Hot Zone" on my personal read-through-splayed-fingers list. - DAN SIMMONS, author of the forthcoming "Omega Canyon" The scariest book I've ever read is the autobiography of my mother, by Jamaica Kincaid. It's categorized as literary fiction, but it's a horror novel, too. It's narrated by a woman whose mother dies giving birth to her and death is the book's obsession. The book is bleak and venomous and yet it's written with such spare beauty. It's her masterpiece. - VICTOR LaVALLE, author of "The Changeling" The scariest book I've ever read is Octavia E. Butler's near-futuristic parable of the sower. Much of Butler's work is frightening because it feels so plausible and true, even when she's writing about aliens or vampires. But this book's dystopia of walled-off communities, useless government, unchecked violence and corporate slavery feels like the waiting headlines of tomorrow - and too many of our headlines today. When I first began reading it, I could take glimpses of the teenager Lauren Olamina's world only a few pages at a time. But Butler forced me to grow stronger as I read. Despite the horror of its prescience, the stubborn optimism that burns at the core of "Parable of the Sower" helps me face our truelife horrors. As Butler wrote, "The only lasting truth is Change." - TANANARIVE DUE, author of "My Soul to Keep" I came of age reading pulp fiction like Iceberg Slim and V. C. Andrews as well as true-crime books like "In Cold Blood." One summer when we were staying in a house in the country - I must have been 14 - I read helter skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi, and began my lifelong obsession with murderous cults. I developed terrible insomnia and lay awake with visions of Manson and his girls lurking behind the trees outside my window, waiting to get me - or maybe for me to join them. - DANZY SENNA, author of "New People" IN THE CUT, by Susanna Moore. I am not usually drawn to detective or murder mysteries, and am ambivalent about books that hinge on erotics and violence against women. But this is such a deft and smart book. I gulped it down in my dorm room after teaching in Vermont during the day and could not sleep for the rest of the night. - MARINA BUDHOS, author of "Watched" DEATH IN SPRING, by Merce Rodoreda, is a terrifying book for me both psychologically and metaphorically speaking, making any dystopian or scary novels written today seem like a quiet, tranquil stroll through America's most festive beachfronts. Her images were so highly ferocious and so controlled that any misguided readers could easily mistake her brilliance for arbitrary oversight or chaotic overintoxication or abuse of symbolism. I love how she uses language in a poetic fashion to penetrate the horrors of fascism and the horrors of survival or of wanting to survive in a debased system that abuses human basic need: to just be. - VIKHI NAO, author of "Sheep Machine"

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 2, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

A lot of new novels come bearing the publisher's plug "erotic thriller," but most pan out to be limp in both respects! Moore's smashing new novel is billed as such--and lives up to its promotion to the fullest. Taut and tense, sparingly constructed and beautifully written, this seductive story of seductiveness follows a deadly sequence of events in the life of a creative-writing teacher at New York University. One of her students is getting a little too close for comfort, but that's the least of her concerns. A murder has occurred within earshot and view of her Washington Square brownstone, and the investigating officer, when he comes knocking, presents a beguiling situation. Isn't he the man she saw in the basement of a neighborhood bar engaged in a sexual act with the very same young woman whose photo is shown to her as the murder victim? Isn't it fun, then, finding herself falling into an affair with the detective, all the while wondering if he's a bad cop, a murderer, in fact? When her best friend is murdered, the titillating game becomes far more than that. The twist at the end is the perfect cap on a book that will keep you up all hours finishing it. (Reviewed Oct. 1, 1995)0679422587Brad Hooper

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Several stunning shocks await Moore's longtime readers in her fourth novel. First, there is the change of genre and locale. Her previous books (My Old Sweetheart; The Whiteness of Bones) have been lush, sensitive explorations of coming of age in a dysfunctional family in Hawaii, in an atmosphere permeated by island spirits and traditions. Here, Moore has honed her prose with knife-like precision to construct an edgy, intense, erotic thriller set in bohemian Manhattan. Her protagonist and narrator, Franny, is a divorced NYU professor deliberately closed off from emotional entanglements. She teaches a class for ghetto youth, meanwhile pursuing her obsession with language; she is writing a book recording the street vernacular and the black lingo of New York's seedier neighborhoods. Though on the surface her life seems circumscribed, she is a woman who takes risks, especially sexual risks. One night, she observes a man with a tattoo on his wrist in an act of sexual congress; though she does not see his face, she remembers the red-haired woman who had performed fellatio when she becomes a murder victim. Questioned as a possible witness by homicide detectives James Mallory and his partner Richard Rodriguez, she enjoys the frisson of danger when she takes Mallory as a lover, in spite of the fact that his wrist bears the same tattoo as that of the probable killer. The predatory, slightly corrupt Mallory is a coolly skillful lover, forcing Franny to push beyond sexual barriers into areas she has never explored. But in testing those erotic boundaries, she puts herself in mortal danger. Moore's control of her material is impressive: as she sweeps toward a knockout ending, she employs the gritty vernacular, red-herring clues and cold-blooded brutality of a bona-fide thriller without sacrificing the integrity of her narrative. The question is: will readers be disturbed‘and perhaps repelled by‘explicit descriptions of sexual acts, scatological language and gruesome violence? 100,000 first printing. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Billed as an "erotic thriller," Moore's (Sleeping Beauties, LJ 9/1/93) latest is erotic, but it's certainly no thriller. The heroine is an English teacher who muses endlessly on the meanings of language, even at times when she should be experiencing intense emotion. She witnesses an event that leads to a grisly murder and becomes sexually involved with the cop investigating the case. Her closest friend, with whom she discusses sexual experiences in detail, is viciously murdered and mutilated by the same killer, and she herself falls victim, an interesting trick in a story told in the first person. Not only is the heroine distanced by language from her emotions, but so is the reader. Not recommended, although Moore has a following and larger collections may want to have a copy.‘Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Moore's latest ought to come with a warning label for unwary fans of Sleeping Beauties (1993) and her earlier works. There's nothing beautiful about this one, and you won't be doing much sleeping once you've sampled its nasty fare of mutilation, decapitation, and coldhearted sex. The narrator is a woman who lives in New York City, near Washington Square, and teaches creative writing to college freshmen. Her name may be Frannyone character calls her that twicebut it's never quite acknowledged or made clear. One night, in a bar, this teacher opens the wrong door, searching for a bathroom, and witnesses a red-haired woman's technique: the way she moves her head ``with a dipping motion,'' the noise her mouth makes; the man's black socks, his unshined shoes, the tattoo of a playing card on his wrist. The only thing she manages not to see is the man's face, which turns out to be a fateful omission when the red-haired woman is found murdered (well, not just murderednobody in this book is simply murderedshe's ``disarticulated,'' or pulled apart, joint by joint). The teacher is unwillingly caught up now in a drama that involves a serial killer, more gruesome death and dismemberment, and plenty of sex along the way, in every position, clinically detailed, with handcuffs or without. Where all this leads to is a horrific ending involving razors, torture, and the lingering smell of blood. In Moore's previous work, a good, dark undercurrent of sex and violence played well against the lush Hawaiian settings and family stories. Here, there's nothing to offset the darknessnot one real and likable character, never one moment of redemption. In the end, repugnant. That's what a warning label might tell you. (First printing of 100,000; author tour)

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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In the Cut By Susanna Moore Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated ISBN: 9780452284807 I don't usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake.But Cornelius was having trouble with irony.The whole class was having trouble with irony. They do much better with realism. Realism, they think, is simply a matter of imitating Ernest Hemingway. Short flat sentences, an adjective before every noun. Ernest Hemingway himself, the idea of him that they have from the writing, makes them uncomfortable. They disapprove of him. They don't like him or the white hunter in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." The bravado, the resentment in the writing excites them, but they cannot allow themselves to feel it. Hemingway, they've decided, Hemingway, the person, isn't cool.I considered giving them Naipaul to read, A Bend in the River or Guerrillas, but I decided that they would be so sensibly outraged by the beating, murdering and dismemberment of women that they might not be able to see the intelligence in the books. I wondered if they would like Graham Greene. Brighton Rock perhaps. But I had forgotten, I don't know how, the dream in which the murderer, straight razor in hand, says only two words: "Such tits."Stream of consciousness, which some of them thought at first was stream of conscienceness, doesn't seem to give them much trouble. They think it's like writing down your dreams except without punctuation. Some of them admitted that before completing the Virginia Woolf assignment they'd smoked a little dope and it had helped. They make these confessions to me in a shyly flirtatious way, as if they were trying to seduce me. Which, of course, they are. Not sexually, but almost sexually. It would be sexual if they knew any better. And someday they will. Know better.But irony terrifies them. To begin with, they don't understand it. It's not easy to explain irony. Either you get it or you don't. I am reduced to giving examples, like the baby who is saved from death in the emergency room only to be hit by a bus on the way home. That helps a little. Cornelius said that he preferred realism to irony because irony turned conceived wisdom on its head. Whether he meant to say conventional wisdom or received wisdom, I don't know. I was so distracted by an image of wisdom being turned on its head that I simply nodded and let him go on. Irony is like ranking someone or something, he said, but no one knows for sure you're doing it.That's close enough, I said.I am beginning to sound like one of the spinster ladies who used to take an interest in me in boarding school, except that they used to bemoan (a word they often used) the lack of manners, civility, and the incidence of haphazard breeding, rather than illiteracy. I hope that I don't turn into Miss Burgess in her good Donegal tweed suit, her snappish red terrier at heel, the dog's own tweed coat beginning to fray where it rubbed against his tartan leash. Summers in Maine with her companion Miss Gerrold in a cottage fragrant with mold. It doesn't seem that bad, now that I'm imagining it. Hydrangeas. Blueberries. Sketching on the rocks.I admitted to my students that I am writing a book about regionalisms and dialects, including the eccentricities of pronunciation. I want them to know that I am not against dialect, or even misusage. I like it. I like that kids now think that Nike is a word of one syllable. Why wouldn't they? Nike isn't a goddess. It's a shoe. The winged shoe of victory. Despite my interest in idiomatic language, however, I do not want them to use phonetic spelling. I do not want to see motherfucker spelled mothafucka. Not yet. Get it right first, I said, then you can do whatever you like. It's like jazz. First learn to play the instrument.Cornelius raised his hand last Tuesday and asked, I'm afraid, if I did not think my book on slang was a diss. A diss to whom? I asked. Stressing the whom.Cornelius waited for me at the end of class. The others lingered around him, gathering their things slowly. He said, people like you think the brothers are guinea pigs. The way we talk and shit.The others looked at me, no longer concealing their interest.I walked out of the room.He followed me.The bars in my neighborhood fill me with dread. French tourists studying subway maps, and pink teenagers from Rockland County who look and talk like they're about to explode, perhaps with rage. I hope it is rage, since they have much to be angry about, even if they don't know it. The blank-faced thirteen-year-old girls with fake IDs and nose studs hoping to meet some sweet-talking Jamaicans; the black boys from the projects in those wide-legged shorts that hang below the knee, and Nautica windbreakers, the shorts making the elaborate running or hiking or telephone-lineman shoes that they wear look enormous and unwieldy, the boys jerking restlessly on the streets outside the bars with bottles of malt liquor in brown paper bags.Just the thought of Bleecker Street makes me a little anxious. Stores full of baseball caps and silver-plated ankhs. Nowhere is there a sense of peace.Cornelius and I sat at the bar in the Red Turtle. He took off his Walkman and ordered a rum and Coke. I said hello to Lothar, the bartender, and ordered a beer.Cornelius gestured at the Walkman. "Smif and Wesson," I thought he said."Smith and Wesson? You're listening to guns?""Not Smith. Smif. It's regional. What you like."He made me smile."And ironic," he said."I think it's you who's ironic."I had once asked him if he would trash-talk for me, a form of humorous verbal intimidation. There are regional styles. In Chicago, for example, it is called signifying and it must be in rhyme. It hadn't been a success, Cornelius talking trash, or woofing as he calls it. He'd been inhibited. You can't just woof whenever you feel like it, he said.He was having trouble with his term paper. That is why he wanted to see me. He didn't want to flunk another class, he said. He needed the credits.I had asked my students to take a true story, a fact, a line from a newspaper or magazine, and turn it into fiction. An attempt to make them write about something other than themselves. It was called, rather grandly, The Re-created Event. I had encouraged them to look for a story in papers like the National Enquirer.And Cornelius had. He wanted to know if he could turn his news clipping of the execution of John Wayne Gacy for the killing of thirty-three young men into an imagined conversation that he, Cornelius, had had with Gacy on the telephone. He wished to write about the sadness it had caused him to feel. Before his death, Gacy's voice could be heard on a 900-number by anyone interested enough to pay three dollars a minute to hear Gacy explain that he didn't kill those boys.Cornelius told me he had spent close to forty-five dollars listening to the message.I didn't know what to say."No," I said. "This is not supposed to be about you, Cornelius.""You said in class once that every word a writer writes, even the conjunctions, even the punctuation you said, is a reflection of him or her.""I don't think I said 'or her.'"He smiled."I'm going to the bathroom," I said. That was my second mistake.I walked to the back of the bar. There was the smell of fried garlic and spilled beer. I did not see any bathrooms, or signs for bathrooms. I went down a flight of stairs to the basement. My eyes are not very good, so I put on my glasses. There were still no signs to help me along.I opened a door into a room full of aluminum kegs of beer. I stopped at the next door. It was slightly ajar. I leaned against it, and the door opened slowly.It was a small room. There was a metal desk. A coffee mug was on the desk, and a small lamp and a digital clock. The number on the clock changed with a loud, reluctant click. The lamp was made from a neon beer sign. In one corner was a jukebox, a plastic garbage bag thrown over it. There was an old sofa.And there was a man sitting on the sofa.His head rested against the wall, his face in darkness. I could see the rest of him clearly, illuminated in the small circle of pink light from the lamp. His suit jacket was on the back of the sofa. His tie was loose, one of those muddy-looking ties you can buy on the sidewalk in front of variety stores, displayed alongside the orderly arrangements of headbands and blank cassettes. His hands lay on either side of him, indecorous, matter-of-fact, the pale palms turned upward in a gesture of supplication. There was a tattoo on the inside of his left wrist.His legs were apart. Long. Slack. He wore black lace-up shoes and thin black socks, the kind of socks worn by a man who is vain about dress. His shoes needed a shine and that made me wonder about the vanity. There was an alluring symmetry to him, as if he were meditating, or balancing, or cajoling himself into what he knew would be uneasy sleep.On the floor was a woman. Her hair was spread across his lap. She was kneeling, her hands on his thighs. She moved her head back and forth with a dipping motion as she took his cock into her mouth, then drew it out, then took him in again. I thought to myself, oh, I don't do it that way, with a hitch of the chin like a dog nuzzling his master's hand. The sound of her mouth was loud. She gave a little sigh and shifted her weight, quickening her movement. He lifted his head slowly and saw me standing in the doorway, my hands crossed on my chest as if I were about to be sacrificed.He did not turn away. And he did not stop her. She made another little moan, just to let him know that she was getting tired, and he put his hands on top of her bobbing head, bunching up the red hair, gripping her, letting her know, letting me know, that he was about to come and he didn't want her to fuck it up by suddenly deciding to lick his balls.I wanted to see his face. He could see mine.He lifted her hair so that I could at least see his cock moving in and out of her mouth, her hand around him, sliding him up and down in time with her mouth. I could see that.There was a stiffening in his thighs and she worked faster for a short quick time, and then there was a barely audible intake of breath as if he weren't going to give away any more than he had to, not even his breath, especially not his breath, and he held her head to him tightly. She began to slow down as he came, and I thought, this girl knows what she's doing.I backed out of the room like a thief and he still did not turn away, his hands in her hair, holding her there so she could not see me, so it was just the two of us.I did not go to the bathroom. I ran up the stairs, looking over my shoulder, suddenly afraid that someone had seen me standing in the doorway of the basement room.Cornelius was not at the bar. He had ordered fried mozzarella sticks to take out. Said he had work to do. Something about a murder. Lothar winked at me. Haven't seen you in a while, he said.When I paid the bill, I noticed that my hands were shaking.It was a few days before I began to wonder why I kept forgetting to take my gray skirt to the tailor. I realized that I did not want to walk past the Red Turtle. I was keeping to my side of the park, what I think of as the Henry James side, even though those of us who live on the Square admit quietly amongst ourselves that he never lived on the Square. For a very short time, he lived around the corner on Washington Place, on the site of which there are now several quite handsome New York University dormitories.I walked to the building on University Place where I teach twenty college freshmen what is optimistically called Creative Writing. (To my surprise, Cornelius was not in class. He seemed to be staying close to home, too.)I walked to the market for half-and-half and cranberry juice. I walked to the post office on Thirteenth Street and Sixth Avenue where a radio is tuned to a rhythm-and-blues station and the line of silent, anxious customers snakes forward in step. I had to mail a book that I had borrowed, an oeuvre erotique, to my former husband, who is strict about things like borrowed books, as well as eroticism. He had written to remind me that I'd had the book for two weeks. The postal clerk, swaying in time to Sonny Boy Williamson, looked at the package and asked loudly, Santos Thorstin? the Santos Thorstin? Making me wonder if perhaps he had a better idea of who Santos Thorstin was than I had. My Santos Thorstin is a fashion photographer who lives in Paris, but I had not realized that his reputation extended as far as the Thirteenth Street post office. Perhaps it was that series of photographs of murdered Bengali child prostitutes that had been turned into art postcards. I think often of something he once said to me: I'm sick of beauty. The clerk asked if it was true that I knew Santos Thorstin, and if I did, would I bring him in the next time he was in town?So I kept to my side of the Square. Excerpted from In the Cut by Susanna Moore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher. Excerpted from In the Cut by Susanna Moore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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