Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence - Erotic Thriller Book for Adults, Dark Romance & Suspense Reading - Perfect for Book Clubs and Late-Night Reading

As a Lawrence Block fan since the distant mid-70s, I've known for a long time that Mr. Block's early work included a fair amount of soft-core porn stuff, so there's no room for shock or surprise from me. In fact, I'm grateful that Hard Case Crime has published this contradictory work by a master of not only mystery, but the complex and interwoven motivations that surround the criminal's life -- and lifestyle.Spoilers ahead:This is a book that returns gleefully to those days, but updates the level of the graphic aspects of a female serial killer who has decided to ritually kill her father every time she has sex with a man. The man gets to stand in for her abusive father, and she is able to have her cake and eat it too, as it were. Not that the subject is humorous per se, but Mr. Block's approach to it (writing as the I-imagine-she's-sexy Jill Emerson) does tickle the funny bone (argh, did I just write that?) on many occasions. There's a sort of feminist satire hiding between the lines here, as well as several asides in which the inhumanity of the monster Kit/Kim actually morphs into a strange and powerful humanity in need of compassion... only to revert later.You see, Kit/Kim has moved about the countryside doing what she does without fully acknowledging her reasons, only the compulsion. But when she analyzes her needs and realizes she let several men escape with their lives (for various reasons) her compulsion switches to finally once and for all crossing them off her list, though that involves finding them first. As essentially a vagabond black widow, Kit/Kim moves from male to (dead) male until she meets Rita, a beautiful woman in whose house she rents a room, with unexpected results that will resonate later. During her travels, Kit/Kim begins to believe that perhaps, if she crosses her uncrossed Ts, she will be free to live some kind of normal life. Since this is essentially a noir narrative, it's not surprising that some of the people she "meets" turn out to be less than wonderful humans themselves, setting up a sort of running comparison of characters' morality and ethics -- which may sound impossible, but Lawrence Block is a master at what he does, and probably only he could manage to layer the book's meanings when on the surface it's only a twisted travelogue.This is not a typical mystery, but it IS a crime novel and it does aspire to do more than titillate, and therefore deserves more than the typical narrow-minded response that some readers will inevitably profess. GETTING OFF (the title itself is a delicious double entendre) is the kind of book only a confident author can pull off, playing with readers' expectations and emotions by making the monstrous occasionally not only acceptable but even somehow likable... The fact that by and large Kit/Kim retains her humanity even while committing inhuman acts is the kind of literary paradox that makes writing crime novels such a kick. Think Donald Westlake's* Richard Stark novels about Parker the thief, for one example, and any one of a number of noir masters who walked the fine line in order to mess with our minds. Lawrence Block can mess with my mind anytime at all.-W.D. Gagliani, author of SAVAGE NIGHTS*edit correction!