Title: What Good Girls DoAuthor: Jonathan Butcher
Series: Elizabeth #1
First Published: May 13, 2017
Publisher: Self-Published
Pages: 119
Genre: Extreme Horror, Horror, Splatterpunk, Transgressive Fiction
Format: Ebook
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Rating:
Synopsis:
She lives with no name. She has never left her room. All she has ever known is pain and abuse.
Until now.
Today, she will breathe fresh air for the first time, feel sunshine against her skin and even witness human kindness. But she has a point to make – a bleak, violent point – and when she meets her neighbour, Serenity, she finds the perfect pupil.
Forced to endure a lesson distilled from a nightmarish existence, Serenity must face unflinching evil, witness the unspeakable, and question her most deeply-held views, until at last she has no choice but to fight for her family’s survival.
Review
What Good Girls Do is an absolutely brutal book, both in the subject matter and in the way that it is written. The book is told through the dual perspectives of Serenity, loving wife and mother of three, and an unnamed girl held captive by her “daddies.”
The book explores some pretty tough topics about abuse, pornography, and the absolutely terrifying reality of how ‘youth’ is coveted. The girl’s narration is unbearable to read, she is severely intellectually regressed due to her upbringing and describes everything in extremely repetitive porn terms. The way that her thoughts are written is grating to read because of the repetition, it’s highly unrealistic but it serves as an effective tool in showcasing the dark underbelly of the porn industry and how sexual objectification scrambles our little spaghetti brains. I appreciated that this book really confronts how normalized violence has become in sex because of the widespread access to porn, and this is illustrated well between the girl’s non-consensual enslavement and Serenity’s consensual relationship with her husband.
Overall a good read, not an easy one, but a heavy one that gives readers a lot to think about.
Quote
“I’m too certain that no matter what horrors she has committed, even to those I love and adore, she is at present a victim, above all things.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Authors
About Jonathan Butcher
Jonathan Butcher is an author who likes to tell really, really weird tales.
Discover more from Radical Dreamer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
