A dark, gritty tale of one young woman's sexual odyssey. Suspect I would have had a greater appreciation for it had I stumbled across Suicide Blonde in my student years, although that being said there is still is a lot going for it. The story is peppered with some genuinely lovely prose, sandwiched between the graphic scenes and the unrelenting darkness of the tale.

While not really my thing, I was glad to have read it.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc.

In places I felt engaged with the story, but overall I felt it lacked direction and plot. I was unable to connect with any of the characters and eventually gave up as I really wasn’t enjoying it.

In Suicide Blonde Jesse is doing what she wants even though she knows it is a bad idea. At the beginning she is in a delusional relationship with Bell, who is really gay. Jesse follows him around, watching him with another man. Jesse also attends to the needs of a grotesque character called Pig, who never goes out. Pig asks Jesse to track down her ex, Madison.
Jesse goes into San Francisco’s underbelly to find Madison. The already murky story becomes pretty dark. Madison is a junkie and a prostitute, and she encourages Jesse to follow in her footsteps. After a foul sexual encounter in Madison's flat, Jesse does exactly that. Jesse is 29, and she behaves much more like a 19 year old. It's her choice to screw up of course, but she seemed quite immature in her choices.
If you desire a strange and transgressive read, that reminds you of Lou Reed lyrics, this is the book for you. Otherwise, stay away.

A dark at some points disturbing story about sexual obsession drugs-everything that’s associated within the sex industry
An ok read but sadly couldn’t get it at all.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Canongate for my eARC in exchange for my honest unbiased review

This was a bit of a weird book in places. It reminded me of Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, only less paedophilely. The novel seems to focus on identity and how this manifests in different characters. The main character, Jesse, seems to drift between sexual partners and is looking out for someone who truly fit with her. The writing was almost as if it was another character as Steinke has a very particular way of writing. This isn't a bad book, it just feels quite average and an okay story.

There are some books that are extremely difficult to give a star rating and for me Darcey Steinke's Suicide Blonde is one of them. Short but so sharp with vivid descriptions- think about darkness in an hotel room put as "mucusy"- the imagination behind the expressive descriptions in this book is no wonder making it a cult.. Can you believe it's been 25 years since this book has been first published?

I can summarise the book as a woman's, Jesse's obsession with her boyfriend (or partner? Or curse?) Bell's bisexuality. But it's gritty, dark, and time to time not pleasant. Still worth reading if you fancy something out of ordinary. Definitely a powerful, nightmarish novel that would keep you awake until you find what is going to happen... Can't help thinking being a 20 something in 90s is a completely different experience then in 2000s!

Thanks to Canongate and Netgalley for this copy.

I'd assumed this must be the book INXS' second-best song was named after, though if anything it was the other way around – and that temporal confusion was prophetic, because more than anything this novel kept reminding me how long ago the nineties was, with a mixture of casual debauchery and old-fashioned attitudes such that I more than once had to tell myself that no, this wasn't the seventies, but yes, it really was like that. There was a sort of low-rent lushness which even the skint could manage, a willingness to transgress without wanting to badge it as anything but transgressive, which is captured well here. Edgier than McInerney, but less so than Ellis, this feels like a book Rebel Inc. might have published. Hell, maybe it was; they're one of those things from that era which you'd think would have more Internet footprint than it has. The tone is "liquid and various" – the introduction bills it as "feminist camp", which sometimes feels right, but for all of the headiness, the sense of being narcotised sometimes tips over into affectlessness, or disaffectedness, or maybe both – the same strange distance from the extremities witnessed and undergone that you find in the weariest Interpol songs. I found the cover's billing of Suicide Blonde as a feminist classic curious; it's not the most obvious angle, though I suppose it fits the story of, by the protagonist's own description, a pretty girl who wants more without knowing what more is, but desperately hopes it's not just marrying money. And simply because this sort of long dark night of the soul, assuaged and/or exacerbated by sexual (mis)adventure, is something experienced much more often by male leads, written much more often by male authors. There are some fabulous lines, which at their best made me think of Kate Bush gone to the dark(er) side: "I followed, her scent rich like menstrual blood. I was curious, I still hadn’t felt that exquisite kick of perversity." But for all that, its jaded tone is communicated so effectively that I'm left glad I don't often give books a star rating, because by the end I was sufficiently numbed that I'm honestly not sure whether or not I liked this.

A strange and difficult to book to review, because even when I finished it I wasn't quite sure if i'd enjoyed the whole experience or really hated it. I had to give it a few days to settle in my mind before I was able to reflect back on my findings.

The story is about a young woman in her late 20s struggling with her own identity and her relationships with pretty much everyone around her. The character of Jesse is a complicated one, she is deeply flawed and I just found her so sad to be around. Such a self destructive lonely character, that seems to blame all those around her for every little thing that goes wrong in her life. At times I despaired for her but most of the times I wanted to shake her and tell her to pull herself together. I struggled with the fact that this was a 29 year old woman and perhaps may have been a little more sympathetic if she has being in her late teens or very early 20's, at some point in life you just need to get your shit together and even when I left Jesse at the end of the book I didn't hold out much hope for her.

San Francisco's seedy underbelly is fully exposed and Jesse seems like just one of the many stories that could be told of the general feeling of isolation and disconnection. Its a walk down the dark side of strip clubs, peep shows and sexual ambiguity. No doubt it was expected to shock the reader but I found a lot of the scenes felt written for shock value alone rather than anything meaningful. In fact a lot of what was being said seemed like it was meant to be deep and insightful, but really it didn't mean anything at all, it was all rather empty.

I don't regret reading the book, it was sad and it made me feel sad - any book that makes me feel something has surely touched me regardless as to whether it was a good or bad experience. However, on the whole I just found it all rather pointless - which perhaps was the whole point of the book.

Smoky rooms, dangerous streets, sleazy sex, lit by neon, to a soundtrack of the 'Liebestod' from Tristan and Isolde, edgy, intense, brutal, where love is tainted but a heart might still be pure, drugs and dreams, purple prose, urban and urbane, Baudelaire meets Kerouac via Anais Nin and Sylvia Plath, love and lust, dirt and desire, experience and annihilation, hypnotic, seductive, lyrical, moody and melancholy, a hymn to loneliness and failed connections, modernity and loss - gorgeous, gorgeous!