Spying On Strange Men (signed first edition)
£12.99
The print edition of Spying On Strange Men, Carole Morin’s noirish masterpiece.
“Deliciously dangerous.” Sir Harold Evans
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Additional information
Weight | .184 kg |
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Dimensions | 21 × 13.5 × 1 cm |
7 reviews for Spying On Strange Men (signed first edition)
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Richard Godwin –
Utterly Brilliant
If you want to read an utterly brilliant, funny, dark, psychological novel then read this now. Award winning novelist Carole Morin has a gift for dark situations, but one of the many areas where she excels is in the ability to turn a situation that seems humorous into something dark. Her protagonist, Vivian Lash is a woman who has murderous intent. She has been betrayed and she wants to kill her husband. Vivian divides herself between husband and lover, juggling personas while confessing to the reader the things she does not say in her private life. As she watches her creepy neighbour, a series of events unfold that will leave you turning the pages of this tight, beautifully written narrative.
J J James –
An Amazing Read
It’s a sinister little book, lacquer red, deceptive white and pearl black.
Seductive too.
Much of it reads like a prose poem, with great skill in playing with the pace and rhythm of the story being told.
It draws you in immediately, wanting to hear more from the narrator in all her different voices.
Anecdote and quotation are used to great effect – The narrator is playing with you all the time… But is she being played with too and by whom?
Is she really telling the real story of what’s going on here?
Does she even actually know what is really going on?
She seems so in charge…
You want to trust her, want her to be right, want the ending to the story be the ending that she wants.
… And then the ending comes – Lacquer red, deceptive white and pearl black.
Masterful is the wrong word here – Spying On Strange Men is Mistressful.
The spinning out of control of the story at the end is especially accomplished.
Vivien Lash is just too clever for her own good. Or the good of anybody else around her.
An amazing read.
Paul Brazil –
Murder, Art, Paranoia and the like…
With the help of Elvis the night porter, Vivien Lash is spying on her Creepy Neighbour who may or may not have killed his wife – who may or may not actually be his wife anyway. Mind you, Vivienne Lash may or may not be her real name but the name she’s using for an art exhibition called Spying On Strange Men. Of course, Vivien herself may or may not be being spied on by a famous film director, who she may or may not be in love with. What’s for sure, however, is that she is intent on killing her cheating husband.
Carole Morin’s smashing Spying on Strange Men is a death black comedy skewered with wickedly funny lines and slivered with sharp observations about deception, self-deception, voyeurism, paranoia, sex, murder, art, life, love, loneliness and loss. And merkins.
Jim Lawrence –
Strange, brilliant, a unique voice
This is a playfully dark and clever psychological thriller with a difference, more Kafka-meets-Nabokov-in-Patrick-Bateman’s-apartment than Barbara Vine, more Surrealist than social realist; a tale of escape, fluidity of personal identity, power and paranoia, betrayal and revenge.
‘The wife’ is a successful artist with a twisted creative process, smart, sophisticated, alluring and seriously unbalanced. She plans to murder her husband and run away with her lover, ‘the director’, who wants to make her a star. She is protean, mysterious, the other side of her alter ego, the exotic Vivien Lash, who may be just as real as her. Her husband is even more mysterious, apparently some kind of globetrotting spy with terrible secrets locked up in a private room. Indeed appearances are many and certainties are few, except perhaps the pleasures of white leather and red Chinese silk and being somebody else somewhere else. The wife/Vivien dares to dream and live those seductively transgressive, liberating dreams through to their conclusion.
Spying on Strange Men is a bizarre, unsettling and funny tale that Moebius- strips away, all twisty-turny and inside-out, the predictability of narrative structure and the boundaries between whatever realities comprise this jet-black comedy and fucked-up romance. It’s a tour de force of multi-levelled revelling in the joys of language and the telling detail, a delicious and disorienting cocktail of wit, weirdness and wayward kicks.
Paul Research –
“I thought I knew all about making art out of toxic romance and vengeful daydreams, but that was before I encountered @carolemorinsoho” Paul Research on Twitter
Fiona Humphrey –
Gloriously dark acerbic wit, walking through the shadows of suspicion. Loved it
Peter –
Blue-black haired Vivian Lash would certainly have given Alfred Hitchcock’s distant blond fetish a major pause, if not cured him of it. Francie’s tourist filled colorful sites turned into dusty exotic locales, Marion’s 50’s bra’s and slips replaced by Shanghai silk underwear, Marnie’s here this moment, gone next sexual trysts made even more neurotic.
Carole Morin’s Spying On Strange Men serves up a black comedy homage to film noir classics: Rear Window, Suspicion, Double Indemnity, Don’t Look Back and references a few others; complete with a twist ending out of left field providing a genuine OMG didn’t see that coming moment worthy of Hitchcock at his best. Sharp, cynical, precise, deceptive.