This body's not big enough for both of us, by Edgar Cantero
Have you ever had an idea or encountered a situation and thought, that would be such a good premise for a novel? No? Well, it's something that happens to me at infrequent intervals, and I have a couple of places where I scribble the ideas down. But I've never attempted to write one of those novels; instead, I flesh out my less brilliant ideas. The reason? Because it's not enough to have a good idea; you need to be able to execute it well, and that isn't guaranteed.
Case in point: earlier this year I read half a novel entitled How to Eat your Husband. Premise: a woman kills her husband, unpremeditated, and the only way she can see to dispose of the body is to eat it. Gory, I'll give you that - but intriguing, if you'll allow? Unfortunately, the intriguingness died out quickly and it settled on gory and dull instead.
Edgar Cantero, in This Body's Not Big Enough For Both Of Us, has taken a good premise and executed it really well. I'm not actually going to tell you what the premise is, because even though the back cover spells it out, the novel itself is structured so that you don't figure it out right away. I found myself wondering how it would read if I didn't know, so I recommend not looking at the back cover.
Fortunately, there's plenty more to say about this book. I would describe it as a sort of action thriller; there are gang wars and undercovers cops and unlikely escapes, although Cantero takes an irreverent approach to the genre. He plays on tropes at every opportunity and doesn't stop far short of the 'your-text-here' approach to content creation. He throws in sex too, liberally and just as irreverently, but it's believable in the character, and Cantero includes a diatribe on the taboo around discussing sex that simultanaously won over the truth lover and the raging feminist in me. There's a child in the story, which takes it all a bit closer to the line; Cantero wards off criticism by being more than aware of this, introducing her to a newcomer as follows:
Case in point: earlier this year I read half a novel entitled How to Eat your Husband. Premise: a woman kills her husband, unpremeditated, and the only way she can see to dispose of the body is to eat it. Gory, I'll give you that - but intriguing, if you'll allow? Unfortunately, the intriguingness died out quickly and it settled on gory and dull instead.
Edgar Cantero, in This Body's Not Big Enough For Both Of Us, has taken a good premise and executed it really well. I'm not actually going to tell you what the premise is, because even though the back cover spells it out, the novel itself is structured so that you don't figure it out right away. I found myself wondering how it would read if I didn't know, so I recommend not looking at the back cover.
Fortunately, there's plenty more to say about this book. I would describe it as a sort of action thriller; there are gang wars and undercovers cops and unlikely escapes, although Cantero takes an irreverent approach to the genre. He plays on tropes at every opportunity and doesn't stop far short of the 'your-text-here' approach to content creation. He throws in sex too, liberally and just as irreverently, but it's believable in the character, and Cantero includes a diatribe on the taboo around discussing sex that simultanaously won over the truth lover and the raging feminist in me. There's a child in the story, which takes it all a bit closer to the line; Cantero wards off criticism by being more than aware of this, introducing her to a newcomer as follows:
My biggest complaint is one that towards the end the plot starts to trip over itself in trying to fit in as much action as possible, but that's a feature of the genre and the implausibility grates less in a book that has made no pretense of trying to be plausible from the start. Overall, I enjoyed it and I recommend it, to anyone who doesn't mind their reading uncensored, that is.
'What's she doing here?'
'So far? Making censors shake their heads and early reviewers tag the plot as #problematic.'
Comments
Post a Comment