Stealing Innocents

There is a dead dove in this bag. Do not eat it.

There is a plethora of extremely messed up shit in this book. Do not read it unless you are absolutely sure that's what you want and can handle.

No, seriously, I'd provide content warnings but in all honesty if you have any serious triggers, you should be avoiding this entire collection in the first place. Do not pass go and do not collect two hundred dollars. Just flee. Don't even look at my review.

You have been warned.

Gamble Everything ???????????????This one literally hit at least 85% of my hard nopes, made me feel actually unhealthy amounts of murderous rage toward fictional people, made me feel physically ill at least thrice, and I still kept reading it. I guess because the major squicks it hit were all centered around erotica - particularly quite a few instant-offs of mine - and I was reading this more for the mindbreak anyway? Idk. I kept being actively repulsed, yet not allowing myself to look away. And it provided a mega-dose of the content I wanted: someone being completely broken in mind and soul... but it provided that too quickly. I wanted to see more of the struggle, the defiance, the horror. Not someone who breaks down completely and loses his internal identity within a week.Not that I wanted it to stretch on - hell, no, I think this one was too long and kept actively checking how much was left - I just wanted the timeskips to span a much longer timeframe so that at least I could get the intensity of a mindbreak story. (What can I say? When I read dark stuff, I'm in it primarily for the psychological horror.) Being torn apart into a completely different personality within a week, though? No. C'mon!I also actively hated the way this one ended. I knew it wouldn't be a happy ending, but still. I felt like all the forcing myself through every squick I have was for nothing. It wasn't quite the kind of bad ending I'd hoped to see. In fact, I daresay that in its own, fucked-up way, it was actually the happy ending I was promised wouldn't happen. I mean, everyone's in a better mindset even if one of them is completely and utterly gaslighted out of who he truly is and being abused regularly.That said, I'm still giggling at the "suckle like a calf at a teat" line because that is neither horrifying or erotic; it's just plain hilarious and was placed in such a way as to break up an otherwise extremely dark scene. I often called back on it to keep myself from grinding my teeth too hard while I speed-read through the grosser parts - especially the ones teeming with misogynistic tropes and, *shudder*, Daddy kink.Though I did learn something about myself: my hatred of excess use of "Sir" pales significantly in comparison to my deep, unending hatred of Daddy kink. So, uh... thanks for teaching me that about myself, I guess...?I'm rating this one low because of the ending being very meh to me, and not because of the content I knew I was getting into when I read it.Crazy ???????????????Well. At least this one was far more of a story than one, never-ending sex scene...? But it was icky, and not in an entertaining way. It seemed to be aiming for psychological horror, which is usually my jam, but instead I just left this one feeling sad and sick. I think maybe the topic of mental health and not being believed about horrible things happening hit me a little too close to home.It was very well written, though. Just also very much not something I appreciated reading.I'm rating this one three stars for actually managing to disorient me with empathetic reactions. And for having more of a plot in much less space than the story preceding it.First and Only ???????????????Meh. This is supposed to be a story about a man 'seducing' his of-age stepson to get revenge on his cheating wife, but it's really very much not. For all the whining the stepfather does about not wanting to go to prison and not wanting to do anything illegal, he sure does jump right into ignoring his stepson's hesitance and lack of consent just to get to what he wants. If you're going to write a character with a fractured moral code, at least make him stick to it.Also, I know this is dark and fucked up and whatever, but when the character who allegedly studied law and allegedly has the good sense to know that he shouldn't actually rape his stepson thinks something as fucking idiotic as "Point of law, Sage: No means no, but only if you can say it aloud." I just... can't. That's not how that works. That's not how anything works. I can handle dark and messed up when I know what I'm getting into, but I at least expect a bare minimum of intelligence to be involved. The fact he carried on and on about that - even imagining how he'd tell a court his stepson never told him to stop - only added more to the feeling that my intelligence as a reader was being not just insulted but actively mocked.That exact, same feeling of having my intelligence mocked resurfaced when the eighteen year old adult stepson tries to escape the abuse by going to stay with a friend and just sits there and lets himself be told 'no' as if he's still a child who needs permission. Sorry, but nuh-uh. That's not how being a legal adult works.I especially didn't care for how it's told from the villain's first person POV. I'm more one for getting into the victim's head because that's where the best psychological mindfucks come from. I don't want to be in the monster's head.Full honesty: I skim-read a large chunk of this, especially once it started hitting some of my squicks. Nothing near as intense as the first story, but I was also mentally exhausted. That said, the ending was very much a happy one in my eyes - but also exactly the kind of thing I'd hoped would happen and therefore I'm giving it an extra star.Falling Angels ???????????????This one murdered my feelings, but in a glorious sort of way. (I'm 99% using the word glorious because of the whole angel theme, fyi.) This started out as the brand of darkness I thrive on: heartbreaking, soulcrushing, dark, fucked-up, makes me want to hug a character (or two, or three) and shield them from the world.I could have easily given this one four stars and declared it my favourite story of this anthology, worthy of reading all the others to reach it... Or so I thought. Halfway through, however, things veered very far off course. Things stopped being heartbreakingly realistic and started being wild and over-the-top and squick-hitting and somehow even more disgustingly repulsive than the first story. (Though it did have more of a plot and less of the sex scenes, and for that I'm grateful.)It was a huge bummer of a letdown, because I'd thought I'd found the perfect dark story in this collection - something dark and horrible but also crushingly realistic with believable characters and a somber, pessimistic tone but nothing insanely over-the-top.Sadly, I had not found my unicorn. It was just a horse with a headband that fell off mid-gallop.

So, yeah. This is a thing I read. And I didn't want to bleach my brain more than five times while doing so.

This counts as a successful consumption of dead dove.

(A note on the rating: It's the average of all the individual ratings. I'm a little surprised it was 2 and not 3, but given how goodreads attributes meaning to the stars it seems about right. This was okay. I didn't dislike it but I also can't say I particularly liked it, either. And since I based my ratings on the storylines, delivery, etc. rather than the entirety of the content, I feel like it's fair enough to rate this accordingly.)