A philosophy professor tests the limits of the soul and body by performing dehumanizing experiments on unwilling subjects, after the department is closed due to budget cuts. Violent Faculties follows a philosophy professor influenced by Sade and Bataille. She is ejected by university administrators aiming to impose business strategies in the interest of profit over knowledge. She designs a series of experiments to demonstrate the value of philosophy as a discipline, not because of its potential for financial benefit, but because of its relevance to life and death. The corpses proliferate as her experiments yield theoretical results and ethical conundrums. She questions why it is wrong to kill humans, what is it about them that makes their lives sacred, and then attempts to find it in their bodies, their words, their thoughts, and their souls—seeking foundational truths with a knife in her home office.
The question of how much space a human inhabits can be interpreted multifariously, and I use that word on purpose. How much space does a human seize? That seems like a practical question. How much space does a human occupy? That seems like another one. The focus of the present study is the latter, for the former might be answered by a practical experiment, while the latter might not be.
This is why I’ve taken Emily.
In order to make any content warnings clear from the get go: This is Extreme Horror. Diet Extreme Horror, but there is far more weird sex stuff in this book than I thought given the cover and first paragraph. It’s still at the level where I’m judging the character more than the author; it is there, though, so if disturbing sexual elements is more than you’re willing to read through in what appears to be (to me, anyway) a slasher movie from the killer’s very specific perspective, maybe steer clear.
Also this review will NOT be spoiler free. Just don’t want to. I also may or may not provide the needed context for those who haven’t read it. Honestly, I’m writing this piecemeal weeks after the fact and it’s probably more accurate to think of this as me parsing out the vibes I took from this than a professional review. So this is going to be more of an experiment of if I’m competent enough to communicate my complicated reaction to this story. You have been warned.
Hook
So why did I initially pick up this book?
Well, it passed my three step test for buying books:
- Does the title and cover page intrigue me?
- Is the plot summary interesting?
- Does the first paragraph/sentence/page draw me in?
So 1 and 2 it passed with flying colors. Neat, I thought, a slasher movie told through a philosophy paper AND from the perspective of the killer. That’s cool as hell. I’m in.
If the quote at the top interested you, you had a similar reaction, as it’s the first two paragraphs of the book.
Line
Okay, so I just want to get out of the way that I don’t really like the genre of extreme horror. And not in a “oh my stars!” clutching pearls kind of way. More in a “hey, why are so many of these stories just all edge, no point?” It’s a genre acting like they’re all holding chef’s knives, when very few have anything more menacing than a pizza cutter. The work has to be either really good, really interesting, or unbelievably bad for me to want to read/watch/whatever it firsthand.
So, maybe it’s just because this story is really good, maybe it’s because it’s more on the lighter side of what I’ve heard tends to be in extreme horror[1]oddly, while the works themselves tend to leave me bored, I find reviews of them highly entertaining. Jule’s Dapper’s Disturbing Book Reviews are highly entertaining if anyone is … Continue reading but I found it a very engrossing read, even when they introduced the weird shit on the second page.
So Emily, the first victim we learn about, was the MC[2]Main Character’s ex. We don’t learn a lot of concrete details about their relationship or it’s disillusion, but we can learn a lot from how our narrator talks about Emily and the kind of “experiment” she chose to use her for. In fact, a lot of the literal “then this happened, then this happened” details are missing. The timeline, how long it is, and the literal playout of events are left very vague, but not in a way that left me feeling confused or robbed of the opportunity to understand the story. I think having it be this quasi-academic paper really softened that blow. It’s not the first time I’ve been fuzzy on the details when reading some philosopher’s ramblings. And it leaves the focus squarely on who our narrator is and what is going on in their head (or so they say) as they do the attention-grabbing-serial-killer-things.
So that’s what I’m going to focus most of my review on.
Weird things I noticed about our narrator
She has a lot of glaring contradictions in how she acts and the beliefs she holds, not all of which seem to be conscious to her.
She goes on about how she doesn’t need to justify the harm she’s doing to others while justifying it. She rails against the sexism she faced while she was working as a philosophy professor while picking three overly-religious girls to subject to the edgiest chapter with the weirdest sex stuff in it. In fact, two sets of victims seem to have been picked purely for the people’s connection to organized Christianity specifically. The fact some women choose to be nuns and some choose to follow Christianity strictly seems to make them dehumanized enough that stating they are religious seems to be enough justification for our narrator. The fact she can dehumanize anyone outside of those directly responsible for wronging her is in direct contradiction of both her stated goal of proving philosophy is needed or just straight up revenge. Why is she any different? She mostly relies on “I’m not” and leaving it at that.
She is very obsessed with penetration
Yes, that kind; also the more abstract-but-still-that-kind-if-you-ask-Freud kind. She even outright acknowledges she wishes she was able to penetrate in sexual settings before. I don’t get any kind of trans reading from this, so that’s not what I’m getting at, but she does seem to have completely jumped on board to the idea that the ability to penetrate equates somehow to power.
It is also interesting how she deals with the main perpetrator of her rampage[3]in her eyes. I do not think she’s justified.. So the premise of her being cut from the school for funding is laid on one man’s shoulders, whom she does eventually kidnap and trap in a basement. And while there is the requisite one weird sex thing per chapter, here it’s of a jacking-off kind. His punishment is to regress into a literal Plato’s cave and convince him to Socrates his own way out.
Like, there’s certainly a powerplay here, but it feels less… angry? visceral? It’s the difference of punching someone who disrespected you and talking down to them like they were an annoying child. If anything, I would think this man would receive the punching type of punishment. But she seems to save that for women and the one guy she targeted because he was sexist.
Again, weird contradictions. Believable for a human to have, but weird.
LGBT+ themes?
Maybe? Like, it’s certain she’s bi, as I think it’s pretty clearly stated she’s into both men and women. And the weird not-quite-trans-but-penis-envy-is-definitely-happening-here aspect of her character. I’m not sure if I’m just not reading into it enough here or it’s an excuse to have a female killer have female victims on the docket.
Sinker
I’m not sure if I like this book.
I think it’s technically well crafted. And it’s rare I read books as quickly as I read this one, even with it’s pretty short length.
Honestly reading this reminded me of when I would research serial killers in high school. Not out of any romantic interest[4]god that crowd makes my eyes roll but out of a fascination with the extremes humanity is capable of. And with serial killers specifically, what would make someone want to do any of this, as many of these killers clearly wanted to do. I would usually come to the same kind of “??? *gestures at screen*” type of answers with them too. People are complicated. This book does a good job of capturing that.
I think the biggest strength of this book is we don’t get a clear answer to why, even as it’s a big long justification and description of action from the person doing it. I do not understand this woman. I doubt she understands herself nearly as well as she thinks she does. Sure, there’s the easy answer to the question: “Why did she go on this killing spree?!” but “because she snapped after losing her job and she wanted to prove a point” doesn’t really seem to answer everything.
If it was just about her job, why target any of the women involved?
If it was just because they could help symbolically uphold her point, what was that exactly? That philosophy is important? To show those consequences when that’s not at play? Except everything she does does have some kind of philosophical justification. The fact this paper exists disproves that. But without it, it would be too vague. And why were so many of her experiments based on already existing philosophy that didn’t have to bore holes into anyone literally to prove their points? Are the murders for more than shock value within the world this takes place?
I’m sure there’s a lot I’m missing from this work. I have only read it once and am writing this with some temporal distance. I’ll probably get more out of a second read, but I want to let it percolate a bit more before diving into it again.
I certainly enjoyed it, even if I’m undecided on whether I like it.
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