There's absolutely no way that I believe that this is Micah's debut novel, because the prose is so wickedly beautiful. I think I'll be having a book hangover for awhile after reading Micah Nemerever's epic These Violent Delights. ©2020 Micah Nemerever (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers But as their orbit compresses and their grip on one another tightens, they are drawn to an act of irrevocable violence that will force the young men to confront a shattering truth at the core of their relationship.Įxquisitely plotted, unfolding with propulsive ferocity, 'THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS' is a novel of escalating dread and an excavation of the unsettling depths of human desire. An admiration isn't the same as trust.Īs their friendship spirals into an all-consuming intimacy, Paul is desperate to protect their precarious bond, even as it becomes clear that pressures from the outside world are nothing compared with the brutality they are capable of inflicting on one another. But as charismatic as he can choose to be, Julian also is volatile and capriciously cruel. He idolizes his friend for his magnetic confidence. Paul sees his wealthy, effortlessly charming Julian as his sole intellectual equal - an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating.

A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure, incomprehensible to his working-class family, and desolate with grief over his father's recent death. When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. 'The Secret History' meets 'Call Me by Your Name' in Micah Nemerever's compulsively enjoyable 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.

These violent delights micah nemerever