Product Description

Set in contemporary Glasgow, The Cutting Room is narrated by Rilke, one of the most engaging, flawed and hedonistic fictional creation of recent years. When this dissolute and promiscuous auctioneer comes upon a hidden collection of violent, and highly disturbing, erotic photographs, he feels compelled to unearth more about the deceased owner who coveted them. What follows is a compulsive journey of discovery, decadence and deviousness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94362 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 294 pages

Review
THE DARK SIDE of Glasgow lies behind this black, erotic thriller. Homosexual antique dealer Rilke is commissioned to sell at auction the entire contents of a deceased old man's estate. What seems a straightforward deal turns suspicious upon the discovery of a hidden collection of erotica, secreted away in a loft. The chance unearthing of a packet of disturbing photographs sets Rilke on a trail through Glasgow's pornography industry in search of answers. Transvestites, rent boys, sadists and the generally sexually perverted all make an appearance, the possibility of snuff activities dangling over the story till the finale. Deceit, double-dealing and degradation fill the pages with the self-effacing, downward spiralling Rilke at the centre, trying to cling to reality and his sanity through a drunken haze induced by the horrors he has found. Homoerotic, this is not a book for the sexually squeamish. Newcomer Louise Welsh writes with unusual candour, succinctly capturing the various sexual persuasions and preferences mankind has always chased. Her easy style ensnares the reader, drawing them down to the dregs of depravity at the same time as tantalisingly teasing the plot along till its climactic ending. - Lucy Watson

The Times
Astonishingly this is a first novel, catapulting Welsh straight into the superstar league, while establishing Rilke as a classic original.

The Independent
The Cutting Room is a hugely commendable debut, assured and memorable. Crime fiction may have its prize-winner at last.

Customer Reviews

Atmospheric
An atmospheric thriller, based upon an auctioneer's discovery of violent pornographic photographs during a house clearance, with homosexuality, brooding sexual tension and an ever-present sense of imminent menace thrown in for good measure.

Louise Welsh has a light touch in her writing, lending a subtlety to the dark and troubling scenes she creates; relationships, both on the one-to-one level of brute sexual desire and in the wider sense of man's relationship to man, are convincingly portrayed.

Two rather stilted homilies towards the end of the book, on people trafficking and the behaviour during the Orange Walk, therefore sit rather uneasily in the context.

All in all, however, this is a satisfyingly challenging read.

Cracking Read
This is a great book and I can't recommend it strongly enough. Loved everthing about it; great plot, great characters, great dialogue, brilliant evocation of seemier side to Glasgow, beautiful obsevation and none of the self consciously "fine writing" that spoils so many new British novels, nice and meaty and real. Nice use of quotations too and I really enjoyed all the references to Romanticism and Scottish literature (The drinks bar is called Gilmartin's, from the Justified Sinner). I can't remember reading a new book that was so generous to the reader in providing plain old fashioned reading pleasure, there's even (rarest of joys) a great ending with a real sense of closure. Just fabulous.

A cut above the rest
This book restored my faith in crime fiction! A dark story, set in a dark city, with a wonderfully dysfunctional hero. Beautifully written and tensely plotted, this is a class act for a first novel.