Reviewed by Mykola Dementiuk
While reading ‘Roses Have Thorns’ I couldn’t help but think of that real life serial killer known as the Green River Killer who did away with some forty-fifty young women if not more, in Seattle and Canada during the 80s. Though Jude Mason doesn’t tell us that her story is based on him the similarities are too striking to look elsewhere. The Green River killer was after whores and Mason’s Rose, in her clothes and gaudy makeup, fits the description of a street whore perfectly.
She is a hooker turning tricks and one cold wet night with just a few cars passing her by she accepts a ride from a potential customer, Clifford, who instantly spots and eyes her cleavage, a mesmerizing sight. Clifford orders her to disrobe and she teasingly removes her clothes and feels an aroused and erect man moving atop her…until she passes out.
Somehow she survives her mutilation, which it was, and it might be disarming to some readers but I thought it was very real and true to the dangers of life on the streets be you whore with all kinds of customers for a quickie or killers preying on your body. Mason shows us the cunning subtleties of her characters, years later, as they meet and faze into their cunning reversed roles, a prostitute and a killer, to where she exacts her vengeance on him…I’ll leave this to the reader to ebb out the gruesome ending, but one complaint, I wish the story was a little longer, to me it was much too short, I feel because I could read stuff about whores for pages on end…that’s just my opinion. Anyway ‘Roses Have Thorns’ was a very good story at that…sure had me on the edge of my seat waiting to see what could happen next.
***
Mykola Dementiuk’s own novella about street girls ‘100 Whores and other stories’ is due out the Christmas 2009 from Synergy Press.
1 comment:
Mykola,
Thanks so much for your wonderful review of Roses. You got it!
Hugs
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