Avon Impulse, $4.99, ISBN 978-0-06-236907-9
Contemporary Romance, 2015
Now this is more like it. After the anomalous Chase Me that is actually very fun at places, the next book Need Me moves back straight into vomit-inducing formulaic new adult territory. Oh, I’m sure that there are genuinely good new adult stories out there that are fun to read, but Need Me is more at home in that cesspit full of asshole heroes with irrational road rage behavior and their victims who keep making excuses for them. Sure, Ben Dawson may not have tattoos and his mother did not violate him with a burning hot poker when he was ten, but he is one of the most chillingly cruel deranged pieces of shit ever.
Honey Perribow is a southern belle who twice wrestled hogs and came out on top. Now in Columbia University as a premed student, she experiences the need to change her underwear each time she attends Prof Ben Dawson’s English literature class and gaze upon him… everywhere. As she tells her room mates, she’s determined to make Prof Dawson go down to Honey Town. Incidentally, the only reason this book has one oogie and I didn’t went out of my way to find a special “less than zero” icon for this book is because the author’s sense of humor and charming wit shine through from every page… at least until Ben turns into a psychopath piece of shit and any semblance of humor pales compared to the amount of goatse behavior from him.
You see, Ben’s parents weren’t happy because his father is a serial philanderer who destroyed the family when he was arrested for sleeping with a minor. Now, Ben lives in fear of becoming like him. The fact that (a) he’s single, unlike his father, and (b) Honey is 20, more than old enough to receive him in three (or seven if you live in Japan) orifices don’t seem to register on him. So, after he’s had sex with her, he would have to drive her away and be absolutely vile to her because she’s turning him into his father. Not that he will stay away, because the sight of her with any man makes him as angry as a road rage poster boy and as hard as a marble bust of a donkey’s rear end, so he’d then go ahead and have sex with her. Repeat and rinse.
My favorite is his stunt of writing a letter to the Dean accusing Honey of being a predatory horny bitch wanting his peen and he of course doesn’t want that… and he writes this letter after having sex with Honey for the first time. I’m sure I am not spoiling you when I let you know that the letter ends up in the Dean’s hands anyway. But that’s okay, because she gets him in the end as the grand prize – that psychopath goatse-face! Who feels awful for what he did (which is repeatedly sleeping with her and then humiliating her and breaking her heart until the final insult with the letter as the grand “dramatic moment” of this book) because he is lonely, has nobody to stick it to, and he wants to stick it to Honey again. This is love, people!
Ben needs psychiatric treatment because his inability to hold himself accountable for where he sticks his worthless penis into leads him to hurt the people around him all the time. If that thing is giving him so much pain, come to me, I have a rusty chainsaw I’d love to use to cut that worthless waste of flesh off. But no, he has to keep using it and then whine that the person he’s using it on is making his life so awful and turning him into his father.
But Honey needs more of that psychiatric magic because she can’t stop thinking of him no matter what and she takes him back without even making him cut off one testicle and eat it as a show of remorse. And I think I need a few antidepressant tablets myself after reading this book, because the hero’s angst is just plain dumb and, worse, it makes him commit all kinds of psychological abuse on the heroine, and worst of all, the heroine still thinks he’s worth taking back at the end of the day.
Need Me is just vile and my biggest regret is that it is not a living thing because I’d love to hear its squeals as I stab it repeatedly with a knife.
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