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A review by moreadsbooks
What They Do in the Dark by Amanda Coe
1.0
This book sucks. Coe manages some pretty good writing as she tells the achingly sad stories of Gemma and Pauline, two girls in the same class at school who happen to each have awful mothers. Gemma's favorite child actress is Lallie, who is shooting a Lifetime-style movie about pedophilia, part of which takes place in their school over the summer. This leads to lazy interludes with an older actress on the movie set, Lallie's agent, and a terrible caricature of a Hollywood producer, a woman named Quentin who develops an inexplicable crush on some guy & pines for Quaaludes all the time. If you can manage to bear these bits, there's some really lovely writing about the two girls - until the inexplicable denouement, wherein Gemma and Pauline brutally torture and murder a black classmate named Cynthia.
I finished this book at midnight, which is whoa-late at night for me anyway, and didn't have the heart or energy to read something else to take the taste of this murder out of my mouth. So I lay in bed for another hour or so, thinking about Cynthia, especially in the context of where the girls meet her; in the laundromat, laughing and talking with her mom, showing more life than they'd ever seen from her at school. So what is the point of this? Good literature gives you characters that you think about long after the book is done, but with all its other clumsy problems, this isn't good literature. Cynthia's death made me sick to my stomach. It smacks of cheap, shitty sensationalism, of an author who couldn't think of how to end her book properly, so she brought around a tangential character to revel in torture & try to inject some shock value. Everyone deserves better than this out of the books they read.
I finished this book at midnight, which is whoa-late at night for me anyway, and didn't have the heart or energy to read something else to take the taste of this murder out of my mouth. So I lay in bed for another hour or so, thinking about Cynthia, especially in the context of where the girls meet her; in the laundromat, laughing and talking with her mom, showing more life than they'd ever seen from her at school. So what is the point of this? Good literature gives you characters that you think about long after the book is done, but with all its other clumsy problems, this isn't good literature. Cynthia's death made me sick to my stomach. It smacks of cheap, shitty sensationalism, of an author who couldn't think of how to end her book properly, so she brought around a tangential character to revel in torture & try to inject some shock value. Everyone deserves better than this out of the books they read.