Book Review: These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

“All they were — all they had ever been — was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.”

This review contains spoilers.

This book was an interesting one for me. I both equally abhorred it and found it too fascinating to put down. It took me a while to get through and yet the story lingered in my mind at every waking moment like a fog. I suppose, given the subject matter of the story, the way I read this was fitting for a book about both obsession and horror — the entire time I felt like a voyeur watching a car crash, peeking at the scene through my fingertips, unable to look away.

This book had been hovering on my TBR list for a few years, and after a spate of light-hearted romances this year, I yearned for something more challenging again. This book seemed the ideal candidate, and so I picked it up.

I had no idea what to expect going in. These Violent Delights is one of those stories that hovers at the fringes of popular culture, and as such I hadn’t seen or heard anything about it prior to reading. I think, ultimately, that was a good thing; the way the story twists, the things the two main characters convince each other to do, had me wrought with anxiety the entire time. Particularly towards the latter half of the book, the narrative felt like a dial that was oh-so-slowly being turned up, a pressure cooker of a story with a completely unclear ending. I did not expect the way it did pan out, nor did I see how else it could have panned out, and to me that is one of the markers of a good book.

The premise of the story is this: the main character, Paul, graduates high school early and gets a spot at a university in his home town. There, he meets the enigmatic Julian, who also graduated high school early, and this forms part of the basis of their friendship. Paul and Julian become fast friends, and in time lovers, and the narrative follows them over the course of about a year or so where we see how this relationship develops.

Paul as a main character is highly, highly angsty, and there were several points in the book I wanted to shake him. Though, frustratingly, it’s very easy to be empathetic — the book is set in 1970s Pittsburgh, which for a start was a politically charged time in American history, and on top of this we have Paul’s family issues and the suspicious undercurrents within every conversation he has with his family. His father, about a year before the story begins, died by suicide, and his Jewish family can’t wait for Paul to find a girl to settle down with. Grappling with his father’s death, as well as knowing he doesn’t like women but not wanting to admit he’s gay, results in Paul having a lot of underlying anger, to a point in which it’s scary, and we see hints towards this very early on in the book.

“I kill them because they’re beautiful, and it’s the only way I can keep them.”

Julian, at first glance, is the complete foil to Paul, however as the book progresses we see they are more similar than expected. Where Paul is quiet and emotionally locked up, Julian is loud and charismatic, caring and good with family and friends. He seems light and happy, and has lots of opinions on lots of things, delighting in debate on various matters. As the story progresses, this is revealed to be a facade. I found myself not knowing whether this was genuinely the case, or whether Paul’s bitter perception was skewing my viewpoint.

The writing in this sense was excellent. The way I didn’t particularly like any character and yet couldn’t put the story down was annoying in the best way. Towards the beginning of the book, I empathised with Paul and had a love-hate relationship with Julian, yet by the end of the story these two opinions had switched, and I found myself taking Julian’s side. Paul had some deep psychological issues and managed to obfuscate them from me as the reader for a large portion of the book.

It is fair to say, then, that the way these characters were written and how they interact with each other was the highlight of the book. The lowlight was that I really didn’t know what to take away from the story.

Not all stories need an overarching theme or message, of course, however because this book is so nicely written and covers a fair few heavy topics in it’s 450-or-so pages, I expected there to be something. As it was, when I shut the book for the final time I felt as though I’d just read a story written by a teenager who had not yet gained the perspective of reaching adulthood and having these feelings crystallise into something meaningful. It was a storm of emotion without necessarily any direction, and while yes this did linger with me, I’m hard pressed to say why.

Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable (I think?) book and I’m glad to have read it. I’d recommend this if you’re looking for something a bit idiosyncratic and off the beaten path, as this was definitely unlike anything I’ve read in the mainstream.

Read: 30/7/25–2/9/25

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars