Brute Madness

Ledru Baker’s Brute Madness is the kind of book I haven’t read in a while. The kind of novel that’s both ridiculously stupid and ridiculously, stupidly fun. A hardboiled Cold War spy thriller about a nuclear scientist and a woman, this book has action, adventure, and… well, what made me see the book in the first place.

That “distinction”, and one that made me go “I have to see this” when I heard it was the claim that the book had some of the worst sex scenes ever written. I was not “disappointed”. In fact, the book has the audacity to make such a scene its very first paragraph. Wow. Adding to the uh, experience is Baker’s constant repetition of the word “erect” to refer to things like someone standing up, something with obvious Freudian connotations.

The book overall is an ultra-trashy cheap thriller. But it’s a fun ultra-trashy cheap thriller. There’s definitely a place out there for horribly so-bad-its-good books like this.