The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot: A Review

I do not want to read The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot. The stories are uncomfortable and violent and the people in them are vicious and abrupt. I would not want to be stuck in a lift with them. I would not want to sit and drink coffee with them. Any moment I expect these stories to tell me to bite the kerb, and then I will hear them raise their boots.

I don’t want to read these stories, but I have to read them. J. Bradley — that silver-tongued cad — makes me. You can stop reading, he whispers, but then you’ll never know. So I read, because I have to know. And it’s worth it. Bloody hell, it’s worth it.

Bradley’s stories are full of the most unpleasant and fascinating misanthropes I’ve met this year. They want to go back in time to convince their mothers to abort them. They have hate-sex. They say things like “I’m gonna fuck you so hard, you’re gonna have Down’s Syndrome”. But as soon as I start to edge away from them, there’s Bradley whispering in my ear again, and I have to keep my eyes on the page, and before I know what’s happening the story is over and these people are inside my brain. And they do not leave easily.

‘Just Do It’ is  an uncomfortably funny story about a child who sees a man on TV snorting cocaine off a knife:

While my mom was asleep, I grabbed the open box of baking soda from the fridge, then a teaspoon and butter knife out of the silverware drawer. Everything smelled like ozone and wet plastic after. I told my mom I cut myself from practicing shaving.

It’s my favourite story in the collection. Actually, it’s my favourite story of this whole week; perhaps even the month. It’s a perfect example of why I do not want to read this book: as the story progresses I just know something bad is going to happen, something terrible even, something that will make me squint up my eyes so I can’t read the words properly. And something horrible does happen, and the story has stuck in my head ever since. It’s that bad, and that good.

There’s a tenderness to these stories too, a wish that the things they do now will make things better for the future. A warning, a precursor. From ‘Primer’:

The bullet burrowed through the bark and into the trunk like a seed. Some day, I hope a little girl bites into one of these apples and coughs up the princess sleeping inside of her stomach.

This makes me think that maybe these people aren’t so awful after all. Maybe I could stand to have coffee with them. The lift might not even be so bad.

Each story is a fist to the jaw or a pinkie finger slipped into the cheek. Bradley’s style is perfect for the short form — it’s somehow wordy and sparse, words filling up the mouth but pared right to the bone. Some of the similes are so perfect that I have to put the book down and run them through my brain a few times (“My parents took pride how they stood like spoiled slaughterhouses”) and some just make me frown (“Cassie walked in our apartment like a transcription”), but I hadn’t read a single one before. Love or hate them, these similes are original, and the same can be said of the whole book.

I’m not promising that this book will leave you giggling into your lunch, or set up some pretty dreams before bed, or that you’ll be able to tell your partner about cute story you read.  In fact, you might not want to read The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot. But you have to. Trust me.