Review of Sadie the Sadist
By Zané Sachs
Review by Casey Douglass
Do you know much about
sweetcorn? I didn’t until I read Zané Sachs’ Sadie the
Sadist. I bet that even if you
do know a fair amount about it, your eyes will widen when you see
what Sadie uses it for. She has to work with it, preparing it for
mindless shoppers to come to the supermarket and purchase for their
screaming kids and snooty partners. It’s little wonder that
something that features so heavily in her work life ends up being a
useful tool in her personal life.
Sadie
is one of the downtrodden masses. Someone who has to live their work
life under the thumb of petty bosses who never let a little bit of
knowledge or common sense interfere with their ability to stick their
nose in whilst blindly following the rulings from “the top”. It’s
enough to make anyone snap. Sadie does, and in a quite spectacular
fashion. She develops (or discovers) an alter-ego that gets to live
the life that she desires. No longer being stepped on or pushed
around, no longer crying at her workstation wondering if her numb
fingers will get her through one more day.
To
say too much more would be to ruin some of the twists and turns that
run through this tale. There is gory retribution, rape and all manner
of other sadistic (the clue is in the title!) events. Things
naturally escalate, go wrong and still carry on with Sadie frequently
trying to work out what is going on herself. Zané’s use of an
unreliable narrator who is questioning even her own ideas of reality
works to great effect and provides plenty of misdirection and
uncertainty. There are also great little diversions into the peril of
self-help books and the merits of robotics and the possibility of
mental transference to iPods.
Interspersed
with her questionable tale, Sadie inserts a few of her choicest
recipes for the reader’s possible enjoyment. These start out simple
enough but soon require more macabre human-based ingredients such as
knuckles, various bodily organs and testicles. Not something that you
will see on a TV cooking show any time soon! These interludes give
your brain a mini-break from the carnage of the main story and seem
to sit just right with the overall pacing and tone.
Sadie the Sadist
is a brutal tale that is an easy and sometimes queasy read. If you
like your fiction extreme, adult and with a dark humour, you will
like this. There are elements that are American Psychoesque but Sadie takes them to greater, bloodier extremes. You will also learn something about corn.
Visit Zané’s site here or search Amazon for Sadie the Sadist and give it a try.
(I was given a free review copy to read).
(I was given a free review copy to read).
Rating:
5/5
