Alexis Hall's Reviews > Our Kind of Cruelty

I just fancied a thriller.

And this is … this is fine?

I think I’ve said this before, but part of the problem with reading a thriller is that you know you’re reading a thriller, so you spend the entire time squinting for twists and waiting for the other shoe to the drop.

There is no other shoe here.

It’s about a book about an unwell gentleman who believes his ex-girlfriend (happily engaged to someone else) is still into him. Partially based on the fact they used to play a game called Crave, where she would go to a bar, and get someone else to hit on her, and then he would be like, wtf dude, and then the other bloke would get all scared and this would turn them both on like whoa.

So essentially the narrator has convinced himself everything that’s happening is an elaborate game of Crave. Which leads to, you know, a whole host of bad shit.

Mostly I think I am glad there was no other shoe. I mean, the optics of “and she was secretly evil all along” would have been bloody terrible. And, in my more generous moments, I saw the book as sort of being in dialogue with the thriller genre as a whole—specifically the whole Manipulative Sex Woman trope that is at once so titillating in the right fictional context, and so fucking harmful in any other.

I mean once shit gets super real, the focus of the novel pretty much bypasses the chronically unreliable narrator to emphasise the various messed up ways gendered expectations play out not just through the criminal justice system but in Society As A Whole TM.

In the baldest possible terms: that a woman will pay a price for getting off on sex games that no man ever will.

These are not unobvious points. But I guess they’re effectively made?

Unfortunately I semi recently read, err, of all things Lolita. And that book is so much the Grand High Monarch of unreliable narration that the unwell gentleman of Our Kind Of Cruelty felt pretty limp by comparison. I also don’t know how I felt about his time in care—he has had a bloody awful childhood, and has been seriously damaged by it. I’m not sure if this was meant to give him nuance—some elements of sympathy for a reader to cling to rather than refuse to spend another minute in the company of such a terrible human being—or if the absolute last thing we need is another story about how care leavers are under-socialised to the point of sociopathy and hadn’t we better scared of them.