Monday 21 April 2014

Dark Review - Sadie The Sadist

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).

Rating: 5/5