These Violent Delights

 This was another book that I found out through booktook and was convinced I would enjoy. All I knew about it before I got it was that it was LGBT, dark academia and that the main characters were quite horrible and pretentious people. Everything about that sounded like it would be right up my alley, so I decided to purchase this from my local Waterstones. Unfortunately, while ‘These Violent Delights’ was compared to ‘The Secret History’, it only served to remind me of how much Donna Tartt’s novel was superior, even if I did not enjoy that one very much either.


The novel follows Paul and Julian, who meet as college freshmen in Pittsburgh and strike up a relationship that soon turns into a dangerous game of obsession and desire. We learn that they are from different classes entirely, Paul is from a working class Jewish family while Julian is an epitome of WASP-iness. Still, they see each other as only intellectual equals, and look down on pretty much everyone else. Their two characters were the biggest problem in the novel for me. I found that we learn everything there is truly to know about them individually and also in this toxic relationship quite early on, and the novel after that drags on too much, especially in the middle part.

While I don’t mind characters introducing their own philosophies through conversations with each other or the environment such as college lectures, in ‘TVD’ they were too shoehorned in, there only for the author to convince us that Paul and Julian truly are that much more intellectually superior to others. Often, these discussions did not add a lot to the overall plot or the character development. It was only there because the author wanted to do too much telling and not nearly enough showing.




The success of the novel hinges on the believability of the intensity of the relationship with Paul and Julian. Unfortunately, while the author is hell bent on trying to convince us that these two men cannot live with each other, that they were so drawn to each other they even commit crimes together, I did not believe it at all. Perhaps this was because I felt very little to no attachment to either of them as characters, or just because the author did not believe his readers that we would understand his story so he felt the need to keep explaining and over-explaining every interaction between them.  It watered down the intensity of what could have been an incredibly impactful discussion of the thin line between violence and desire that the author was interested in, based on his afterword.

I don’t know for sure how much of an influence Donna Tartt had on Micah Nemerever while he was writing this, but I can definitely see why this was advertised as ‘The Secret History’ meets ‘Call Me by Your Name’, although I am not sure that is a good thing. While I was reading it, I kept comparing this to ‘The Secret History’ and I’m afraid that it failed in comparison every time. While Nemerever can write and there is a lot of great potential there, my fear was that he had fallen too much into wanting to be dark academia, resulting in relying too much on the tropes and not enough on developing his own writing style and story.

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this novel as much as I thought I would. While I expected a poignant and intellectual discussion of the line between desire and violence, what I got was too lackluster characters whose every interaction with each other felt flat and uninspired to the point I found myself skimming through the pages because I could not deal with them anymore.

This is a ⅖.


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