Matt Thorne’s new novel might have been more usefully subtitled ‘A Suspension of Disbelief’. A novel called Cherry about sexual desire and manipulation, about a real (or possibly imaginary and perhaps, at best, invented) woman called Cherry, and with a cherry on the jacket. A cherry surrounded by splashes of …what? Blood, ink, barbecue sauce? Because whatever it is, it probably isn’t cherry juice.
A strange and intriguing hybrid of a book: on the one hand firmly rooted in very contemporary obsessions and psychoses — the predictable ‘darker side of love’, according to the blurb — and on the other hand teetering on the crumbling and endlessly reforming brink of allegory and psychotic fantasy.
To begin to read this short novel is to slip one’s finger into one of those novelty woven finger-traps — something at once simple, inviting and seemingly easily escapable, and yet something deceptive, ensnaring and panic-inducing; a deceit which apparently defies not only logic and strength, but also the simpler laws of physics.
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