If You Died Tomorrow I Would Eat Your Corpse – Wrath James White

2.5 stars

I’ll be straight, I started this with very different expectations of what I would be reading. The cover and title led me in a very different direction from the actual contents of this book.

From the intro, I was told that most of the poems contained within are about the author and his wife, which… cool, that’s fine. Then I read the poems and realized they’re all centered around their explicit sex life. This book was very…..self-aware, you could say. The author very much wants readers to know how good he is at kinky “fringe” sex and pleasuring a woman, mostly through pain (very reminiscent of old edgy Tumblr). This book felt awkward to me (like listening to Strokin’ by Clarence Carter while your parents are in the car) as I had no choice but to picture the author and his wife engaging in these explicit acts.

I’ve read plenty of dark erotica and horror romance, so I’m certainly no stranger to extremely kinky and depraved scenes, but this read more as a braggy “look at me, I’m so kinky and dark” than actually being what he claimed to be. After a bit, it got to be pretty repetitive, but I suppose there’s only so many ways to say how great you are at sex.

Parts of this also felt weirdly kink-shamey and body-shamey. It’s almost as if the author was mocking the DD/LG scene in the first short story, or at least trying to write it without understanding any of the actual mechanics or dynamics that are involved. Certain parts felt body-shamey too, like saying how she gained weight and it amused him because it was like she was tired of conforming to female beauty standards and mentioning how gravity-defying her chest was, unlike those saggy, awful D-cups.

There were a few poems that stood out for good reasons. I loved the “I’d burn the world for her” vibes of ‘Remainder’, and I thought it was a beautiful love poem with just the right shades of horror mixed in. ‘Sex & Slaughter’ was a great example of how toxic and obsessive love can be. ‘The Murderer You Wanted’ and ‘Sympathy for Frankenstein’ were great too!

There’s definitely an audience for this book somewhere. It just wasn’t me.