Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #271810 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Publisher
Pacy and erotic thriller
Frannie is good-looking, divorced, living alone in New York. She likes being on her own just as much as she likes sex, and she is not afraid to take risks. Then one night she surprises a handsome man with a red-headed woman in the basement of a bar. When the woman is found dead in Frannie's neighbourhood, her private but unsheltered life is overwhelmed with dark suspicions and even darker desires... "A ferociously uninhibited erotic thriller!" New York Times; "Moore has created a striking and memorable heroine: intelligent, brave, watchful and sexually adventurous...a brilliant, pacy, intense, erotic thriller, packed with beautifully observed detail, humming with melancholy" Independent; "Taps into the deep well of female obsession...builds up an atmosphere of thick sexual tension and arranges for its explosive release" New Yorker; "A compulsive page-turner" Guardian

Customer Reviews

Breathtaking Potential
Susanna Moore's in the cut is an amazing read, appropriating the American Thriller genre while critiquing US society. She depicts a world in which violence, silence and sexual oppression are part of women's everyday lives through Frannie's eyes, an academic who accompanies these injustices with poignant comments on semantic derogation and the way women are locked out of language.
The novels ending (changed for the film) is the real clencher of this book. Shocking, disturbing and powerfully poetic, it leaves you stunned and wanting more.

Moore does not provide her readers with definitive solutions, but instigates the stirrings of a political unrest aimed to induce a committed endeavour to secure sexual equality in an era in which political complacency has taken hold.

Gripping, haunting, and erotic
I decided to read this book after being intrigued by the film starring Meg Ryan. I didnt want to see the film as these so-called 'erotic-thrillers' are always hugely rubbish when transferred to film. Some things are best left inside your head, in the realms of the imagination- and this book is definitely one of those instances.

The relationship Frannie develops with Mallory is like an unemotional, sexual car wreck - they dont seem to care about each other and are just driven headlong at each other by lust. This controlling nature that Mallory displays, whilst seemingly not ever attaching himself to anyone is compelling and really fuels the story.

Moore says all that women think about sex, sexual encounters, and power but that women never say out loud. Her style of writing and lack of chapters, obvious plot breaks and lack of detailed explanations for things leave the reader as heady, lost, and driven as Frannie. For the first time I really saw and understood a main characters flaws, motivations, and desires.

An excellent book - hell, I may even watch the film!

Too raw to stomach
"In The Cut" has been described as erotic - there is a fine line between erotica and basic pornography which I feel Moore crosses. Be warned: it may be too explicit for some. It is the story of Frannie, who starts an affair - little more than physical - with a married detective while he works on trying to catch a murderer. It's a typical woman-meets-dangerous-man story, and the shame is that Suzanne Moore doesn't develop the characters enough to make you understand their motivation or break out of the cliched plot. You watch Frannie go towards her own doom without particularly caring, and without knowing her. Both Frannie and her friend have pretty unfulfilled lives (Frannie doesn't seem to know what she wants, her friend only sleeps with married men), while the male characters seem to get away scotfree, which jarrs the reader and also is unrealistic.

I haven't seen the film, but this isn't a problem as I feel one medium should be judged independent of the other! Moore has power in her honest, sometimes beautiful writing, but all in all this is a rather unpleasant book. The ending, which is rather shocking, leaves you reeling - so do read it, but beware that 'erotic' means different things to different people.