Because She Thought She Loved Me
Maxim Jakubowski
The Do-Not Press, pbk, 181pp, £7.00
Review by Andrew Hedgecock
On one level, Maxim Jakubowski’s latest erotic thriller is a chilling tale of chicanery, murder, emotional manipulation and self-deception. But it also reads like a lubricious Rough Guide - an unflinching exploration of the sexual underworlds of London, Paris and New York. Imagine a fusion of the lust and intrigue of the classic noir thrillers of Jim Thompson and James M Cain; the moral decay, cruelty and emotional game-playing of Christopher Petit’s Robinson; and the self-destructive erotomania of Moorcock’s The Brothel in Rosenstrasse.
Joe has everything going for him: he’s earning good money and he’s having great sex with the beautiful and adventurous Caitleen. Caitleen, however, is married to Joe’s boss, Zeusmark, an Internet porn baron whose ruthlessness makes screwing his wife a really lousy idea. Joe and Caitleen come to see killing him as their only option. When they discover a bizarre club which offers its members private erotic shows, Caitleen is keen to explore the farthest reaches of sexual pleasure, pain and humiliation. But Joe isn’t up for it and the relationship begins to fall apart. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Cornelia works as a stripper and contract assassin to fund her expensive taste in rare first editions. She applies the same sedulous and controlled approach to both activities, seeing them as complementary forms of erotically charged performance art. In the final segment the two narrative strands collide violently.
Jakubowski taps into contemporary male anxieties about women gaining social power through greater control of their sexuality. The characters are all erotically obsessed in one way or another, but Caitleen and Cornelia profit from their experiences. Caitleen turns her sexual history into a novel, to Joe’s disgust. By operating according to traditional assumptions about the boundaries of male and female sexual behaviour, Joe and Zeusmark cast themselves as victims. Jakubowski is a brilliant craftsman. Even if you hate this book - and many readers will be disturbed by its violent and pornographic scenes - you’ll be seduced by its elegant plotting and deft characterisation. Joe, Caitleen and Cornelia are manipulative, self-obsessed sociopaths, but you’ll be driven to discover what happens to them.
It’s not all nastiness and gloom. It’s playful too, with self-referential gags. Jakubowski is happy for the book to advertise its influences: it begins in London on a wet, dark, cold ‘Dashiell Hammett kind of night’ and the Paris segment opens with the city curtained in a dirty, grey shroud of rain on a ‘Derek Raymond sort of afternoon.’ An excellent read.