Knife Edge by David Callinan

 

I received an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and publisher Endeavour Media in exchange for an honest review.

Knife Edge is the story of Ella and Ed, two ugly teenagers at a posh private school full of beautiful people. A chance win at a gambling facility leaves Ella able to afford the best plastic surgery in the world, enabling her to make herself and Ed beautiful. Unfortunately things get complicated when their childhood bully, Scott Stockton enters the picture.

For the most part, I really enjoyed this book. The pacing is a little slow but I genuinely had no idea where it was going and the sense of horror which came from that was very enjoyable. It is a very weird story and this can make for a bit of a jarring reading experience, but once the plot kicks in properly then it becomes a very interesting tale about identity and revenge.

One thing I do have to say is this book got weirdly sexual near the end. Before the 70% mark, I'd say the only sexual aspects were plot relevant and somewhat justified by the narrative. There are two rapes in this book but both serve a narrative purpose (maybe this could have been accomplished by different acts but I'm not here to debate that). However, at the 70% mark there were some unnecessary sexual scenes which I think distracted from the actual horror of the story. The first was some characters visiting a kind of underground sex/gay club and this was full of uncomfortable characters who served no real purpose. The word transsexual is used repeatedly and the whole scene could have been cut with no harm done. The other thing which I wish wasn't in the book was a male character murdering a female character in a sexually-graphic way. It felt lazy and again, I was genuinely feeling quite tense until that happened and it just became cartoonish. These scenes both felt like they came out of nowhere and didn't fit the rest of the book for me.

That aside, Knife Edge really does have a lot to offer. The horror mostly comes from the characters but there is also plenty of violence to keep slasher fans happy. It poses some interesting philosophical debates about identity and what it means to be a good person, and it's definitely not a book I'll be forgetting in a hurry.

   Overall Rating:

.5