WHERE THE VILE THINGS ARE

A modern epistolary novel focuses on love and manipulation in the Bay Area.

It is August when Cécile Volanges writes to her friend Sophie Carnay. Cécile is in San Francisco staying with her cousin after completing most of her undergraduate degree at a private Christian college in Illinois. Cécile comes from a conservative family (her father calls San Francisco “San Sodom”), and she is engaged to a budding young conservative blogger named Jeremy Gercourt. Little does Cécile realize, Jeremy has a past in California. He was once the love interest of a cunning, wealthy young local named Oliver Merteuil. An acquaintance describes Oliver as “a terrible creature behind a gentle face and intense eyes.” Oliver would love nothing more than to see Cécile’s innocence shattered. As he flatly explains to his friend Nathan Valmont, “I need you to ruin her.” But Nathan already has someone in his sights. He wants to conquer Stefan Tourvel, the husband of a controversial alt-right personality. All such plans are merely the beginning. The sordid (and later violent) events that follow play out in electronic messages (and some handwritten letters) exchanged between characters. The story draws inspiration from the French epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and that book’s film adaptations. From the start, many of the messages in James’ tale prove drawn out. Rather than being concise, one individual rants: “Everything’s gone to shit and I don’t know what to do!! I’ve lost the first real thing that ever mattered to me! It’s all gone. It’s so fucked!!” Though verbose, the sentiments are nevertheless intense. They range from the erotic (one character reflects how he filled someone’s “ear with compliments and continued to kiss his skin and caress his thighs and cock gingerly”) to the earnest. At one point, Oliver presents a detailed explanation about the difficulties he faces as an effeminate gay man. People do not understand growing up with “the fear of speaking in class, hearing the waspy-inflection of your words—curled with the delicate-to-extreme lisp that you may have.” Such passionate words give these young connivers a human touch. Though they lack the mystique of someone from, say, Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, underneath all their planning and trickery, they, too, have feelings worth sharing.

While wordy at times, this tale of dangerous liaisons comes packed with raucous emotions.