Bath Haus

Kind of a dark one. The struggle of drug addiction and very controlling, emotionally abusive behavior is highlighted.

The writing got a little overwrought for me sometimes, but overall it was really good compared to a lot of thriller writing which just serves the purpose. The character work for Nathan and Oliver was also well done. Normally I’m not interested in learning more about the characters in a thriller because they’re boring anyway, but here Vernon fleshed out Nathan and Oliver in ways that were effective and added to my experience.

The ending had a really great climax (haha). I didn’t guess the full ending, which was also fun. It was fascinating to start with one villain and then have a different one kind of come to the fore.

The audiobook experience was a bit mixed. The narrator for Oliver went with a quivery voice 100% of the time, which was frustrating. Sometimes Oliver is just describing a living room, he needs to chill.

Oliver, a recovering addict, is tempted to play away while his boyfriend is out of town at a medical conference. But when someone tries to kill him at the sauna, the story he tells to avoid losing his boyfriend, home and life spins out of control.

Not the most uplifting of reads — not least because there are maybe 3 decent human beings in this entire book — but it was really good to read a thriller where the characters are flawed queer people from a queer author, with a more familiar and recognisable relationship to sex than Hollywood’s sanitised view of acceptable morality. Indeed, to quote the author’s afterword:

Though we likely haven’t met—and perhaps never will—I hold an undeniable truth about you, Reader, deep in my heart: You belong in books. Characters who look like you, live like you, and love like you belong in books. Our experiences, our communities, our lives with all their richness and depth and soul are the very things stories are made of—and I owe a profound debt of gratitude to those who read this story and told this queer writer in no uncertain terms, You belong in books.

Given the book starts with a protagonist nearly being strangled to death in a sauna cubicle, the content notes (below) and general darkness of the story will be unsurprising. Oliver’s spiralling didn't quite give me the the page-turning urgency I might have expected, but there were enough gasp-out-loud moments to forgive that, so this is a solid 4½ stars rounded up to 5.

CN: murder, attempted murder, domestic violence, sexual violence, abusive relationship, gaslighting, stalking, drug and alcohol use and addiction, suicidal ideation, death of a parent, abusive parents, threats of violence to an animal, rich WASPy privilege.