#BlogTour ‘Dark Things I Adore’ by Katie Lattari

About the book…

A provocative must-read of feminist fury about the inhuman lengths some take for success… or justice.

Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, thirty years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay.

1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They’re the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed.

2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé’s remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn’t know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web.

Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max’s secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won’t be easy, Audra knows someone must pay

My thanks to Sarah at Titan for inviting me on the blog tour for this outstanding thriller, ‘Dark Things I Adore’ by Katie Lattari which is out in e-book and paperback from September 14th!

It is  not often that I am left speechless by the sheer intensity garnered from reading a novel, but this is one of those times.

As a reader, I felt that I was one of those found objects, being painted into one of Audra’s thesis canvas’, you become woven within the fabric of the multiple narratives and find yourself spiralling deeper into the past, into a well of darkness and obsession which has resulted in the 2018 expedition to the Maine woods.

Audra Colfax, art student and enigma, is taking her ‘mentor’ (he does not really deserve that moniker as he has little to teach her) ,Max Durant to her isolated home, deep in the back woods of Maine, to see the progress she has made on the works she has created for her thesis.

They both have plans for each other, he feels she is about to reveal herself to him, in more ways than one, whilst she has eyes on an entirely different prize…

The tension and potential for violence is felt from before they even get there-Audra is driving, and stops at the last point of civilization before her homestead, and, the ephemera of hunting and taking lives inspires Max to buy a knife-not for a particular function but as a phallic control symbol, to show Audra he can be in control of his surroundings, even though he absolutely is not. It is such a gripping and controlled scene, a simple shopping trip for supplies which is deeply laden with menace and promise of bloodshed, it makes you feel shudderingly cold.

Interwoven with Audra and Max’ narratives, are the testimony, the witness statements almost, of Juniper, a art teacher who spends a portion of her year in the Lupine Valley art retreat, miles from nowhere where those who can afford to, subsume themselves in their craft and create almost a Peter Pan-ish Never Never Land, where evidence of multimedia work is interspersed amongst the natural surroundings.

The students and teachers alike are given natural monikers, so whilst Max and Audra are stalking around each other for very, very different purposes, Juniper’s story reveals just what happened back in 1988, and how the repercussions have led to this peak moment in which Audra will make Max pay for a transgression which he has probably not even realised he has committed, so wedded is he to his own sense of self importance.

This is such a pure joy to read, part of the pleasure comes from trying to guess what Audra has in store for Max, and which of the nature named people-if any-is Max, and what he has done . She shares her pictures, all intricately detailed and painted over scraps of notes, hidden around the Dunn family household by someone named C.D, in 1988.

At the center of the story is this burning flame of vengeance, earnt, harboured and fed for such a long time, against a man who exemplifies the worst of acedemia. He , Max, is a wannabe who never was-his opening scene is him demanding show space in the vaunted Polk Room at the university where he teaches, that his work should take the space previously inhabited by Andy Warhol. His sense of self-importance and ownership of glory is visible right there and then, arguing with the female Professor Switzer that his prestige has brought national recognition to the Boston Institute for the Visual Arts, when, in truth, it is the other way around.

For Max is an empty vessel, who uses his charm to tease the pain and suffering from the unending deluge of female students, using his self proclaimed celebrity to cultivate relationships and then, when he has the image he needs, he paints. He, basically, takes, steals and appropriates the stories of women by taking their pain and painting it. He effectively removes the woman from the story of her life and takes the credit. It is as it ever was, the sheer arrogance and prominence of a man’s social standing passing the story of women off as their own.

It is like a macabre cross between Dorian Gray, where the adoration and attention of women keep the image of Max alive and young, and the Emperor’s New Clothes, where those around him can see the grotesque caricature of him, standing there, naked. It is far past the time that someone showed him his reflection, life size and bleeding with colour, presenting him with each and every woman he has ever trampled upon. And that woman is Audra.

Whilst he has plans to bed her and raise his status by feeding off her artistic endeavours, transposing his status as ‘mentor’ into ‘muse’ (technically, he is not wrong) Audra has planned every single detail of this unforgettable weekend down to the minutiae of the room he is staying in. And by the time she lets him know exactly what is going on, the rolling rage which gathers as you read each page, is a bonfire of outrage, anger that hopes for Max to be incinerated.

It is a pure delight to be able to read and enjoy such an incredible novel as this, I am so very grateful to have had this opportunity to experience the debut of a truly staggering writer who paints her characters and scenery so very vividly that they leave an indelible impression.

About the author…

Katie Lattari is the author of ‘American Vaudeville’ (Mammoth Books, 2016) and the forthcoming Dark Things I Adore (Sourcebooks, 2021).

A revenge thriller set in the wilds of Maine, Dark Things I Adore examines the brutal lengths to which some will go for success, some will go for peace, and others, ultimately, will go for justice.

Katie lives in Maine with her husband and their cat, Alex.

Links-https://www.katielattari.com/

Twitter @TitanBooks @KatieLattari