The Man Who Married Death by Amy Langevin

so obviously trigger warnings for a whole bunch of stuff including suicide, rape, torture and extreme violence. I could have happily put this down at any point. But at the same time it failed to make me feel connected to anything in this book. The poem format works very well to show the instability of Zylen's mind, and makes the gore a bit less in your face (yet also highlighting it). which then leads him to become a serial killer. We follow the depressed and (I guess) delusional Zylen (wtf is that name.) who wants the attention of 'someone' and starts a relationship with Death. And in some ways this writing style really works. It is a 90 paged poem, which is a first for me. This read is interesting? Unique? Special? Let's go with special. And I'm still not really sure how I feel about it. I requested this from Netgalley not sure what to expect, but the title intrigued me.

If I had a penny for every time I failed to kill myself, I'd have enough money to hire a hit man. It might sing to some goth teens out there, who knows. Certainly, it wasn’t intended as a comedy, but then again it’s the way it worked for me and really all readers create their own experiences.

It actually tries (to a fault, really) to live up to its artistic and literary aspirations and its failures are inadvertently comic, so it can be read easily (and very quickly) for some laughs. Despite it all, it actually isn’t the worst thing out there, but mainly because I’ve recently read one such thing and this one at least understands the basic rules of writing, grammar and sentence structure. Like all proper gothic ditties it ranges in style from ponderous to pretentious to preposterous without much of a writing skill or talent to anchor it. Not quite a poem, more like poem adjacent, with some very suspicious rhymes to boot, this is a tale of a 28 year old depressive suicidal pale thing named (kid you not) Zylen LaRocque, which alone should tell you all you need to know about this story, who hallucinates marrying Death and having a passionate homosexual love affair with him, which leads Zylen to become a serial killer. All I can imagine is a goth youth crawling out of their candlelit crypt, dipping their quill into an inkwell and scribbling this ditty.

The Man Who Married Death by Amy Langevin