These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever

 

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever.

Published 16th January 2025 by Magpie Books.

From the cover of the book:

A compulsively readable debut novel about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence...

When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it’s with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and like a stranger to his family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate’s effortless charm.

Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship. But Julian is as volatile and cruel as he is charismatic, and Paul begins to suspect that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.

As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence. From then on, everything changes…

These Violent Delights is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can unleash upon us...

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1971, Pittsburgh. Quiet, sensitive Paul feels isolated from his close Jewish family, but when he enters university he meets someone he immediately senses a connection with. Wealthy, sophisticated Julian catches his attention in his freshman ethics class, and the attraction appears to be mutual.

Loner Paul seems to have made a friend, and he is eager to do almost anything to remain in Julian's circle. Friendship soon turns to obsession, and Paul begins to see the cruelty beneath Julian's cultured, diffident image. But this discovery does not scare him, for darkness lies within his soul too. As their relationship spirals out of control, it is inevitable that it will spill over into violence, and when it does, there is no turning back.

Inspired by a couple of horribly fascinating murder cases, this compelling debut travels beneath the surface to explore the darkness that lies at the heart of two damaged young men - and it is impossible to look away from once you enter their world.

What begins as an unlikely friendship between two kindred souls, gradually turns into a relationship built on an obsessive form of co-dependency that gives them each permission to explore their impulses. Sexual desire and a thirst for intellectual growth combine in a violent journey that has Paul and Julian becoming further separated from the expectations placed upon them by their families - particularly when they decide to plan the perfect murder as an abstract exercise that becomes all too real.

There is more than a little of Patricia Highsmith meets queer dark academia about this novel, especially in the way Paul and Julian recognise something within each other that sets them off down the path of subversion. Nemerever has a ball with a host of psychologically intriguing themes too: loneliness, repression, sexuality, desire, guilt, responsibility, ethics, philosophy, Jewishness, family dysfunction, the legacy of emotional disturbance, and the blurring of love and hate, all get Nemerever's intimate attention, and keep you hooked to the bitter end. 

Absolutely compulsive reading. 

These Violent Delights is available to buy now in paperback and ebook formats.

Thank you to Magpie Books for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Micah Nemerever was trained as an art historian. He wrote his master’s thesis on queer identity and gender anxiety in the art of the Weimar Republic. He is an avid home chef and amateur historian of queer cinema. After studying in rural Connecticut and Austin, Texas, he now resides in the Pacific Northwest. These Violent Delights is his first novel.