Gordon Burn is a talented author. He makes his investigation of the crimes of the British serial killers Fred and Rose West read like real literature. His writing is so good it’s addictive.
The beauty of the writing somewhat delays the realization of what Burn is actually saying. He describes the British people as the most disgusting, nasty perverts in existence. It’s not only Fred and Rose West who are the baddies in this story. It’s the entire British society and culture of the last 200 years, at the very least. Every English family Burn describes is filled with incestuous freaks of the worst caliber. People rape children, including infants, as a matter of course. Every British family, be it urban or rural, is inbred to a shocking degree. The girls all whore themselves out starting before they even hit puberty. Mothers rape sons. Fathers rape daughters. And sons. And grandchildren.
In Burn’s description, Fred and Rose West don’t stand out all that much. They took their debauchery a bit further and ended up actually killing people but, after all the detailed descriptions of endlessly debauched Brits, it’s not very surprising that the Wests were who they were. It gets to the point where Burns tries to blame the Victorian culture for Fred West’s crimes in the 1970s and 1980s. Granted, West couldn’t read and had no way of knowing about Victorians but Burn still insists that there had to be a way for West to find inspiration for his murders in the Victorian era.
The horrible, shocking scenes of child rape are so nauseating that by the end of chapter 5 I started wondering if inflicting a Great Replacement on these evil English people might actually be a good idea. Burns hints at this possibility as he sets the inbred, rapey horrors of Englishmen against the background of kind, righteous and religious migrants.
I thought I was reading a book about serial killers. But it turned out to be something even darker.
Clarissa's Blog 
I couldn’t even get through this book. Not because of the subject matter, but because it was oddly repetitive. It’s too bad, I would like to read a book about the Wests but I couldn’t stand this one.
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It took me a while to understand that it’s a work of fiction and should be read as such.
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Going in with that attitude, maybe I’ll enjoy it more if I give it a second try.
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It’s actually quite symbolic. A British man forces his wife and daughters to offer themselves sexually to black migrants. Obsessed with sexually pleasing black migrants in most abject ways. Destroys his family to please the black migrants. And provides every justification for being replaced by them.
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Does anybody turn into a pillar of salt?
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