Book Description: A vacuum salesman by day, the introvert lives a quiet life alone with his dog until a work relationship and a dark secret from his past team up to create an uncomfortable imbalance in his otherwise ordered life, one that soon finds him squarely at the center of a murder investigation. With his thoughts continually urging him to make people “red and open” and to “achieve it” with his girlfriend Donna, what follows is a sometimes brutal, oftentimes hilarious, and absurdist account of the life of one very anti-social and unexpected anti-hero.
I received this book as an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
I thought this book was an interesting read. It was told from the first person perspective and you never even find out the name of the person telling the story. You get to really feel what he thinks and the thought process that is inside of his head. You can tell that there is obviously something not quite right about him with the fact that he sees people as open and red when he is upset with them. Which would indicate some sort of anger control problem, especially when you learn about the incidents he had as a kid and being kicked out of school. In contrast to this though you see his love of animals, especially dogs, and how upset he gets when someone mistreats them. This was the part of him that I liked. The rest of him I was not so fond of and honestly would have been okay if he had got caught and went to jail.
Overall this was not my favorite book, but I did still enjoy it. I just think I didn’t connect with the storyteller. I think that was because I just thought he was kind of a rude and weird guy. I mean he was funny in the sense that he was brutally honest and would say like the most true things and you would be like well that is a way to look at it. He was rude to Donna though and I felt like why would she want to be with him, even from the beginning what drew her to him. I thought the fact that it was never mentioned they have sex but only that she helped him “achieve it” was a weird and kind of annoying way to put it.
That being said I thought it was an interesting read and really my first dark humor read and maybe that is why I wasn’t as drawn in as I had hoped I would be. I think the idea of the story was well put together and it flowed well and was a quick read. The story was something different than what I normally read and I liked that. I kept guessing on if he was going to get caught or not so I liked being kept in that suspense. I think overall it was well written and liked that it did not end with you guessing on how things were going to work out. Although you have to hope that no one in the future makes him angry enough to want them red and open. I think him having a son has helped that, it was sad to see though that Donna still never got the I love you back from him, but she seems to accept him for what he is, at least the part she knows of him.
Book Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
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