My only caveat is that I have to find said unlikable characters interesting: Emma Bovary, for instance, is not a particularly clever character, you could say she is quite the opposite. Clark’s short horror fiction has been published with Tales to Terrify, with an upcoming novelette from Gehenna and Hinnom expected this year. if i put my hands around your neck and crushed your windpipe and chopped you up, would anyone find you?

Clark is probing some interesting ideas of power and gender by reversing the gender roles with Irina being the intimidating role using her power to exploit her models. irina as an unreliable narrator works really well, and i think that books with unreliable narrators always leave a lasting impression; you’re left wondering if any of what you just read actually happened, if the character you’ve been following in your head is really just a lie.Clark has a sharp eye for the ways people try to represent themselves and there are some great insights into behavior in this book, and how Irina is able to hone in on it and exploit it. She’s naive, pathetic, obnoxious, solipsistic, cruel, and superficial…but I found her acts of self-dramatization to be both fascinating and a source of great amusement. Meanwhile, her fixation with a shy Tesco cashier and a head full of drugs are amalgamating into a dangerous cocktail. Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. Then I found my footing and I couldn't tear myself away from it and ended up sacking off work for hours so I could read the second half in one delirious stretch.

and to ‘merely’ think the other two as to say them out loud in front of someone who is not white, and who she had identified as ‘sensitive’, and risk that he would see her for who she truly was. Here we have Irina, a tall, intimidating redhead criticized by her professor, lesbian art icon and former lover, Frank, for having ‘ had a contemptuous attitude towards my models. People always conflate beauty with goodness … I can just cry a bit, talk like I’m daft, tease my hair up like a televangelist,” she scoffs.

I guess firstly I find it hard to like a book when the main character is so unlikeable and this one was pretty vile! i expected this to be a really interesting read, but it was just 264 pages of following the thoughts of a protagonist. This has notably addressed the entertainment industry, with horror stories surfacing of monsters of anywhere from massive wealth like Harvey Weinstein to niche fame like Ryan Adams abusing and harassing women and many have paused to consider how we process the art of monstrous men (such was the title of Claire Dederer’s viral essay, which you can read here). In Clark’s eyes, the north-south divide has become more of a metropolitan-rural one, partly because every city in the UK now has its own big university. Speaking of Tarantino if you thought that Uma Thurman's character in that or Kill Bill have some merit…well, you might like Boy Parts after all.