Micah Nemerever

THE SECRET HISTORY meets LIE WITH ME in Micah Nemerever's compulsively readable debut novel—a feverishly taut Hitchcockian story about two college students, each with his own troubled past, whose escalating obsession with one another leads to an act of unspeakable violence.

When Paul enters university in early 1970s Pittsburgh, it's with the hope of moving past the recent death of his father. Sensitive, insecure, and incomprehensible to his grieving family, Paul feels isolated and alone. When he meets the worldly Julian in his freshman ethics class, Paul is immediately drawn to his classmate's effortless charm.

Paul sees Julian as his sole intellectual equal—an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. Paul will stop at nothing to prove himself worthy of their friendship, because with Julian life is more invigorating than Paul could ever have imagined. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian is also volatile and capriciously cruel, and Paul becomes increasingly afraid that he can never live up to what Julian expects of him.

As their friendship spirals into all-consuming intimacy, they each learn the lengths to which the other will go in order to stay together, their obsession ultimately hurtling them toward an act of irrevocable violence.

Unfolding with a propulsive ferocity, THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS is an exquisitely plotted excavation of the depths of human desire and the darkness it can bring forth in us.

These Violent Delights

Victoria Hernandez 

Siera Gaidar

It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly 

Uyirmei

It’s that what we call ‘love’ is actually letting your identity fill in around the shape of the other person—you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there’s nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too.

They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.

kemi

I want to go far away, start over, pretend we can wake up from this. To stop hurting you, and to hurt you so badly the scars will never fade. Never to see you again. Never to see anything but you.

These Violent Delights quotes

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