book talk: hooked (or: the worst thing i've ever attempted to read)

jesus christ, do not waste your time reading this book. this truly is not worth it.

the fateful mistake started with me and my roommates making fun of a certain series, the never after books by emily mcintire. these books are just.... baffling. spicy, dark romance modern retellings of disney movies, of all fucking things. focusing on how sexy and hot the villains of those stories are, or whatever.

i'm going to be honest. saying you like dark romance is automatically a side eye from me. i get that it's just fiction, i too enjoy my fair share of morally dark characters, and not all dark romance is this bad, but the number of times i've seen "dark romance" really just mean "we're going to act like assault and abuse is the sexiest thing ever" has turned me off from ever feeling anything other than discomfort regarding the sub-genre as a whole. sorry, but it really is just a no from me.

anyway, these books are crazy, and my roommates all lost our fucking minds over finding them (did you know in the lion king one, mufasa's name is michael faasa? is that not the funniest and dumbest thing you've ever heard?). each one has its own playlist at the very beginning of the book, with deep cuts as hard-hitting and edgy as heathens by twenty one pilots and look what you made me do by taylor swift (both of which are taken from hooked's playlist, which is basically wendy x captain hook mafia bullshit. yes, these songs are printed at the very beginning of the book. it's that serious, apparently). we immediately knew these books would be just as awful as they seemed from the outside, but we each decided anyway that we should all assign each other a book to read, just to see if we could actually get through them.

that was a few weeks ago, and if it's not obvious yet, hooked was the one i chose to tackle. i downloaded a free epub (thank you to my favorite book pdf website that i will not be naming publicly) onto my books app, but after rolling my eyes over the very first paragraph, i doubted i would be coming back to it.

that is, until today. the topic got brought up again by a tiktok sent to our gc, and two of us decided to dig in while we were convened in the living room for nightly tv time. roommate A got through all of his book (crossed, the esmerelda x frollo one where frollo is a priest named cade who gets off on killing people, and esmerelda is a white stripper) by skim-reading, every so often screaming out a laugh of distress and reading aloud whatever bonkers quote they ran into. personally, i was not as lucky to finish hooked, physically unable to skim read or even really focus on reading that much at all. as it stands, i am 86 pages out of 400 in, with 10 chapters down, and i could not make myself read any further for fear of actually losing my mind.

hooked tries so so very hard to be edgy, with cpt. hook as a tortured, dark man with a total obsession about wendy's father (peter pan sorry, peter michaels, my bad. obviously we can't use his actual name here. oh and peter owns an airline called NevAirLand, which is the most unserious thing i've ever read) and literally fantasizes about killing peter and then....... engaging in adult activities with wendy on top of his dead body. bodily fluids mixing and all. it also has its moments of questionable writing choices stylistically, and a few places that felt like there were one too many visits to thesaurus dot com to try and sound smarter. the thesaurus wasn't even used where it mattered, because already i've run repeatedly into the words thickening and palming in reference to... certain typically male body parts. can confirm that they show up just as often in crossed, as well. please stop using these words. i'm actually begging.

i simply cannot fathom how anyone finds this sexy. i'm one part too busy losing my mind about why the author decided her mafia romance had to be connected to peter pan, and two parts weirded the fuck out. i haven't even gotten to any actual spicy moments, but i'm certain once i do get there i will be just as weirded out as i am now (because i really am trying to stay committed to reading the entire thing, if only so i can give it a one star review on every book logging website i use). this book's mere existence and genuine popularity feels like a sign of the end times. and i'm only being a little dramatic about that.

also there's a character named roofus that i'm certain is supposed to be a reference to rufio from the 90s movie hook, which is actually a personal offense. you keep rufio's name OUT of your filthy mouth.

as i continue writing, i'm worried about bumping up against spacehey's rules. this book really is just too adult to talk about in any detail, and i promise i don't intend to promote it in any capacity. if anything, i'm doing the opposite. stay the fuck away from these books if you have any sense and care for yourself. and for my sake, too.