The Venus Complex

Serial killers. Are they born without conscience or compassion? Are they programmed in the womb, their DNA containing the propensity for inhuman violence? Are they made, forced into a monstrous mold by external stimuli like a square peg hammered into a round hole by a warped child? Is it a little of both? Does it depend on the individual? Or can a serial killer choose his or her craft much the way the artist chooses a medium, honing their skills and creating their own unique style, eventually producing masterpieces, not out of oils or acrylics, but from flesh and blood?

Michael Friday is a dark weave of all three profiles. A stone cold narcissist and control freak from the get go, Michael has never committed a violent act in his life, until the night he has his suspicions confirmed. His wife Angela has been fucking someone else. Angela doesn’t even really care that Michael knows. In fact, she’s leaving him and taking her assload of money with her. One horrific car accident later and Angela is dead. Michael himself is grievously injured. And so no one, not even Angela’s parents, suspect that the accident was anything other than exactly that: a terrible accident. Only Michael knows that it was murder – a spur of the moment crime of passion, but murder nevertheless.

The road to recovery is long and painful, but Michael’s body eventually heals. However, his mind and personality have been irreversibly altered. His mood swings are more extreme, ranging from aching black despair to crimson fury within seconds. His sex drive is insatiable. His lusts have taken an unexpected necrophiliac turn that haunt his dreams. Whatever compassion he might once have possessed is utterly absent, replaced by a cold, calculating egotism.

That is, until he falls headlong in love with Elene, a beautiful blonde psychology professor he spots on the campus where he once taught art history. But how to impress this incarnation of perfection? How best to prove to her his vast mental and physical superiority to all other men who might seek to win her affections? Stalking her isn’t good enough. Michael must own her. He must find a way into her life. It must be ingenious. With Elene acting as his unwitting muse, Michael is wholly inspired. He will create works of art so profoundly flawless that they cannot fail to capture Elene’s full attention, inspiring an endless, admiring wonder within her as to the identity of the artist. His canvases will be the bodies of the beautiful women he has carefully selected, seduced and strangled to death. His posing of their bodies and poetry scrawled upon their naked torsos will be his own personal Valentine’s to Elene. Venus, the goddess of love, will unite them in orgasmic sprays of blood and ravenous, mindblowing sex. Wholly convinced of his prowess, his invincibility, his own godlike existence, Michael cannot conceive of anything possibly going wrong. But when his intricate and meticulously planned efforts start to unravel, and Elene fails to live up to his expectations, Michael’s fury explodes like a dark supernova, and his capability for sadism and cruelty proves to have been barely even tapped.

Taking the bold approach of telling this sordid tale from the killer’s perspective, forcing us to accept him as our protagonist and even to occasionally empathize with him, Barbie Wilde – best known to the horror community as The Female Cenobite from Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 – has crafted a serial killer story every bit as warped as Level 26, as exacting as Harris’s “Hannibal” series and more sexually adventurous than Fifty fucking Shades of Gray could ever hope to be. It’s dripping with humid sex juices, slick with sweat and blood, as filthily satisfying as a well fed pig’s wallow in the world’s muckiest mud puddle on the hottest of summer days. Not even in Hell’s deepest, darkest labyrinth could you find anything sicker, nastier or more depraved than the narcissistic conquests of Michael Friday, the killer you should hate, but can’t help but like a little bit. And Wilde’s ability to make this smug, arrogant bastard at all likable is both amazing and deeply disturbing. My moral compass tells me I should hate her for this, but my morbid curiosity demands that she produce a sequel post haste.

Written in journal entry format, The Venus Complex is a quick, dirty little high-speed read, tense and shamefully exciting and almost impossible to put down. Imagine the hottest, horniest fuckbook in the Black Lace library spliced in with a Quantico serial killer profile report and you’ve got The Venus Complex. Read it and try NOT to squirm, either in ecstasy or horror. It simply cannot be done.