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It’s You That I Want to Kiss
Maxim Jakubowski
The Do-Not Press paperback, 222 pages, £7.99
Published November 1996
ISBN 1899344152
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)

‘Stripping was probably easier than whoring . . . Anybody could find a job entertaining drunks. They didn’t know the difference between crap and a quality strut.’

If they made a movie out of It’s You That I Want To Kiss, it’d be that kind of a movie where the blood-drainingly scary Christopher Walken hams up Mr Big. You know the kind of thing; the dapper Man From Caracas.

Nympho Anne and frustrated Jake (‘All he really wanted was a fuck’) are expats. They meet in Miami Beach and fuck. She hooks for thrills. He lives off of whatever money he brought from London. Both are running from a past. Then a certain small-time hood called Teddy Caliban offers Anne a job, muling merchandise from South America for the aforementioned Man. But she gets scared and greedy when she finds ice in her toothpaste and bolts with lover boy Jakey for New Orleans, pursued with sadistic glee by the nail-hard, anal sex loving Evil: ‘In his way, he’s an artist in pain.’ Anne is going down: carved up, gang raped and worse because that is what betrayal means when you fuck with Mr Walken.

But they are not, for all its obvious cinematic bent, about to make a film out of It’s You That I Want To Kiss. [Though the rights have been sold, so anything is possible . . .] It is, as Jakubowski would no doubt be first to admit, a disgusting book. A pornographic, fun-sized family pack – orgies, ageing swingers, rape, a soupcon of S&M. Scatological, cruel, violent.

The beginning is reminiscent of Charles Willeford’s wonderfully honest Florida novels, especially the never forgotten Miami Blues:
‘Caliban pulled the skirt up . . . brutally inserted a finger – or was it two – into her. Penetrating deep inside her, his signet ring scratched her still-engorged lips.’

But this is a love story of a whole other bent. Evil and Anne and Jakey we recognise from Laurence Shames or Doug J Swanson. The diamonds are a MacGuffin. This is Carl Hiaasen out of Bret Easton Ellis, though it doesn’t all work; once or twice Jakubowski – author of a collection of ‘romantic pornography’ – oversteps an imagined line. While, for example, there’s a grotesque, almost Burroughsian sadism to Evil’s early rape/homicide, the later switchblade/cigar torture is certainly questionable. The sub-plot about mortally-challenged radio cults is a real third leg.

Still, this rampant, page-turning, cheek-welded-to-tongue misanthropy is energetically enough written, if you’ve the stomach; a real quality strut. •

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