Name: Broken
ISBN: 9781912986101

BETSY. REAVLEY

A dark and compelling psychological horror from an international bestselling author.

The Most Disturbing Book You Will Read This Year

Broken

Bad Girl Bex

Total shite. A weird, badly written idea for a plot, poorly executed, with little redeeming value. You know that the whole Jude thing is crap. Using the name 'Jude' alone seemed like Reavley was trying to root the character in some literary history: Patron Saint of Lost Causes? Yeah he be that. Jude The Obscure? Yep he's definitely that. Hey Jude...Take A Sad Song And Make It Better? Yeah, that's how she uses him. It's pretty heavy handed. As is all the rape and torture porn. Now I'm not complaining about that content on the grounds of it being too upsetting or offensive - far from it. I'm pretty much inured to anything like that. I've been so thoroughly desensitized to all forms of violence that I really don't care how much you hammer nails into the knees of your protag, or if you set fire to her and then drag her ulcerated burned back down a splintering wooded work surface. I really don't react at all to hearing about how the baddie raped her every which way to the moon, till she practically died from internal bleeding. Heck even throwing a bucket of piss all over her didn't make me flicker an eyelid. What it DID all do however, was bore the tits off of me. 

We live in a time where the notion of a video nasty is something we can now pretty much laugh at. I grew up watching 'banned' VHS copies of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and 'A Clockwork Orange', wondering what all the fuss was about. You can show me videos or write lengthy description of the most explicit torture and I won't bat an eyelid (unless it involves someone I truly care about - and trust me that is a very short 'single-digit' list). But I can appreciate when it's done well (one of my favourite films is a French one called 'Martyrs' which has some pretty cool violence and gore in it). This book was not done well. I didn't care about the character. I didn't care if she lived or died. I didn't care if she escaped or was shackled there for ever. She was a boring, dumb, one dimensional annoyance who I would happily have plucked the toes off of using pliers, just to break up the abject monotony of her personality - or lack thereof.

However the author goes full pelt, torture porn, trying to shock the reader into a sense of just how gruelling and savage an attack from a loony sadist can be...but just ends up writing a boring old treatise on the various things one can do to a human body when there's eff all on the television and you need to pass the time. It's a bit like 100 days of Sodom. After a few chapters you're like "Yeah I get it, you screwed everyone you could think of, in every single orifice they had, then had a poop-eating-piss-party and made your captives screw their own offspring...I get it....you're like super-fricken depraved....but I've seen all your tricks. I'm bored now. What else have you got to offer me?"

This book is so unbelievably dull and pointless and badly written. Save yourself the time and the money. Find something that doesn't scream I'M JUST SO TERRIBLY EDGY! LOOK AT ALL THE TERRIBLE THINGS I CAN LIST HERE!

Broken The Most Disturbing Book You Will Read This Year

Reviews