Read and Then Burn This

by Ryszard I. Merey

An aspiring dancer moves to a new city to reboot after an accident, and quickly gets sucked into two parallel, very contradictory relationships--with the man of his dreams, and with a woman who pushes him in a frightening new direction. A numbing-of-age novella about flesh over mind and living your most (in)authentic life.

Genres: Fiction

166 pages, Paperback

Published December 6, 2023

About the author

Main account over on I. Merey.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite simply, a tale of one ‘Attention - Seeking Dance Whore’ who’s just too good to ignore!

Absolutely loved every aspect of this adventure which takes place in the modern, and progressive world of gay romance.

Ly, a young male dancer from California, suffers a serious leg injury when performing on stage and so decides to make a clean break and start again by taking up a position teaching dance to young children across the country in Boston. Here, he is about to meet Valerie and Colin, two very different characters who, for totally different reasons, will dramatically affect his personal emotions, ambitions, wants and needs regarding both his overall happiness in future life as well as in having a serious impact upon his coming to terms, and sense of being at ease, from within his deeply-rooted inner core, free spirit and performing arts driven very existence.

‘Read and Then Burn This’ has a truly engaging and refreshing storyline that revolves around very real and believable characters that whisk you away on a romantic, yet darkly, mysterious journey crammed full of twists and turns which ultimately leave the reader thirsting and begging for more. However, quite literally the only slightly strange distracting factor for me was the matter of Ly’s age. In the story he is said to be only 19, but his maturity, and already vast range of life-skills and knowledge, would suggest someone possibly being in their early to mid - 20’s. However, at one stage during proceedings it becomes blindingly obvious why the author has made this the case, and thankfully it does not detract from the overall joyous experience of briefly living within the set dream-scape and familiar, plus highly believable, location and locality.

Yep, a genuine, cast-iron 5-star short story for me that truly delivers on its promises, and I very much look forward to enjoying and taking pleasure in reading the other two standalone adventures set within this series of thoroughly absorbing, vibrant and dynamic, coming-of-age tales that live and abide in the rather unusual (at least for me) world of queer romance.

A free ARC gratefully received from BookSirens, with my views given voluntarily and on an unbiased basis. Thank you.

[Zilla Novikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember when you were 14 years old and you sat on the edge of your bed and put a new CD in your Walkman and your headphones over your ears and as you listened to the music you thought, "This musician has been here, inside my bedroom, inside my skull. They must have been here. They understand."

And then you got older and you weren't 14 anymore and that sense of wonder from someone who understands a part of yourself you'd never been able to articulate doesn't happen so often, and besides, most feelings are universal so what's the magic in someone perfectly encapsulating a sensation, a feeling, that everyone has anyway. It's not special. It's not about you, alone in your bedroom, wondering what it would look like to find a connection.

This book hit me like a burning dump truck.

There's a special kind of lonliness that's not queer specifically, anyone can feel it, but it hits the part of myself that doesn't know who I am and who anyone else is either, not in their entirety, not what it means to be an authentic self, to stop reaching for something perfect and bury white hands in the filth and squalor because it's better to feel unclean than nothing. Anything's better than being cold.

If you're queer, or lonely, or burning, read this

[Clarissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was with great anticipation that I started reading the second published work in Merey's Season's series, and from the opening sentence to the last word, it didn't disappoint.

This is a study of tangled sexual and romantic relationships from the perspective of Ly, a 19 year old dance teacher freshly moved to Boston. This glimpse we have of his life deliberately gives no answers, painting a reality of confusion where people make bad decisions that could ruin all their happiness just because. People are not logical, practical machines, but complex messes that have no hope of understanding themselves let alone others.

Threading through this book, as it was in A+e, is a difficult relationship with food and eating. As a dancer, Ly must have an intense focus on his body. This is explored through how he approaches sexual intimacy and the aforementioned issues of food. One of his sexual partners, his roommate an older woman, quickly notices his limited meals, upsets him by thoughtlessly taking food from his plate and is prone to mocking him as anorexic. His other partner, an incredibly attractive dancer in his 20s whom Ly is romantically smitten, with mostly seems to just accept it as part of Ly's personality. There is no sense that Ly will ever be 'cured'.

This is in one way a very accepting story, people just are, sexuality can escape and slip away from the labels we self-enforce on ourselves, even what should be a sugary happy ending doesn't ever have a full stop.

[Rachel Ashera Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear fuck that was unsettling. This short, richly complicated novella is a tense dance between Ly, a danger twink at the crossroads of a dance career, Colin, his older, perfect new boyfriend, and Valerie, his hot mess of a roommate who repulses him by day but is irresistible by night. It complicates our societal narratives around sex and gender and gives no easy answers, catharsis, or even resolution. Oh, and it's just beautifully written. I feel like I'll still be talking about this for months.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

a free copy of this book was provided by the author for an honest review

What am I supposed to do with this? I had so many
emotions running through my veins while reading this and they're still raging inside of me, and this review is my only outlet. What follows this sentence is a bunch of ramblings so be warned.

Ly and Valerie are a beautiful mess together. Their relationship, if you can even call it that, is beyond fucked up and toxic. And yet...I was rooting for them??? Rooting for what, I have no idea. There is no universe in which they can have a functional and healthy relationship. But the pull that someone has on you just can't be explained. It's so bad for you but that's the appeal. You can't help yourself.

The way sex is used in this story felt like its own character. It's the elephant in the room that no one wants to address head on. Instead, it's dealt with in the dark, in secret and whispers. When it's nice and clean and claimed, it feels polished and performative. What happens at night was visceral and had me blushing. It was WRONG, but hot. Why is it always hot when you know it's no good for you?

Do I relate to Ly? Yes and no. I don't think I would do the things he did. But I think as people get older, exploring and questioning are seen as youthful, naive, and irresponsible traits to have. I got the sense that even Valerie didn't know what the hell was going on. Sometimes you gotta go with the flow and then pretend nothing is amiss in the light of day.

You live life by living it. You'll hurt people and people will hurt you. Fascination and disgust can go hand in hand, just like love and hate. For example, I love this author and that he writes books that connect with me so strongly. But sir, how dare you leave me with all of these feelings to unpack and process. I have work in the morning!

[Briar Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, young love! Have you ever been nineteen, shallow, insecure in your art and inexperienced in the world, and making poor sexual decisions? Haven't we all. This is a book about that. I find the relatively small scale of the proceedings, and the emotional numbness/constipation of the characters, makes this feel all the more sordid. Ly's narrating voice is lovely, really convincing as both a naive, bitchy, flaky guy who doesn't read and as someone with such a heightened and honed sense of aesthetics that it borders on the hallucinatory.

[Bryan Cebulski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rysz is so good at writing characters with motivations so obscure not even they understand them, who are so unlikeable that it feels painful to follow them for too long, yet as you move along you begin to develop a strange sympathy for their self-destruction.

Ly had me grindig my teeth at the beginning, and then the book's brilliant themes exploring gay masculine insecurity and toxicity (especially in that most tempestous of gay archetypes, the chaotic twink) rose to the surface more clearly. Then I was still grinding my teeth. BUT I understood and appreciated why.

[Katie Hall-May · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an unsettling read in some ways. I've said in other reviews that I admire Ryszard Merey's writing for his ability to draw you in, whether you like it or not, to the minds of his characters, whether you like what they're doing or not - and dare you to judge! And you can't, because in the end it is always relatable. There were times in this novella when I wanted to scream "no, what are you doing!" at the character but at the same time it was impossible not to understand why they were doing it. Ryszard is always very good at describing that sense of trying to work out who you are sexually, and doesn't shy away from the fact that it might be different to who you are in terms of your sex, your usual preferences, or your gender. This novella left me unable to avoid admitting to myself that everyone's sexual self can want something their more rational brain despises. He describes so well that you can layer a fantasy over reality until the two have blurred and you can't quite distinguish between them, and the burden of carrying that knowledge, especially when you can't explain it to yourself. He is an unflinching author, exposing you as a reader as much as he is displaying a character. You get drawn in and you identify, no matter who you are, what you're doing or where you place your sexuality. It wasn't my favourite of his Seasons series, but I couldn't find a way that it didn't deserve 5 stars for the writing, so I've given it that alongside the others! I think they work very well as a set and so, as I've said in other reviews, I think it's worth buying all of them and going on the journey!

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ly's got this gay boyfriend, of whom he feels that "some people have in their beauty, or grace, or fluidity, their talent — something that kisses divinity. And the rest of us are condemned to be blinded by it. To long for, but never touch it." He feels sure: "I could not have possessed whatever it was that made him blinding."

Ly's also got this straight roommate, and he immediately feels he knows her, not in a pleasant way, having "gone to school with fields of girls" he perceives as "peaking at seventeen, misguidedly superior, falling over their own feet to make you their punch line or their pet." With them, this was the reliable dynamic: "Ignore them until it soaks through that we are existing on different planes." Well, with this roommate, it doesn't soak through.

The boyfriend picks up on it: "there was something about her, I don't know, something so off-putting, that made me think: no. Anybody but her."

One wintry day, you, dear reader, were walking into the movie theater in Boston when it happened. You felt the heat but didn't know what it was. A latte was thrown. "The cup bashes against the window — the lid flies off — hot liquid slashes out, cracking the windshield's carapace of ice — " That was the mess of the queerness.

Hey, do you relate to this? There was a relationship that was reciprocally hot, and another kind of relationship that really wasn't, and everything should have been easy, but for some reason...

[Dale Stromberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Endowed with a narrator whose charming, energetic wit and bite gradually reveal that he is hardly the most reliable teller of his tale, this novella unfolds as an erotic Bildungsroman which traverses the darker regions of consent, identity, and attraction. Ultimately it grapples with self-deception and the unknowability of the other.

Lysandrze “Ly” O’Neil defines himself as a gay man and, even more crucially, as a dancer. Yet he does not entirely inhabit these identities when the story opens—there is a schism between him and his own body. An inner inhibition prevents him from embracing eroticism; as for dance, a quintessentially corporeal art, he is strangely reluctant to plunge into the career he dreams of. There is a misalignment between the man Ly thinks he is and the man Ly is being.

Two key people come into his life: Valerie Beaumont, a roommate with whom he gets on like oil and water (“as people, as friends,” Ly gripes “our connection is flatter than a week-opened can of three dead flies in it Coke”); and Colin Savoy, a devastatingly attractive twentysomething dancer and all-around Mr Perfect. Ly and Colin are fated to end up in a love relationship, but something about his bête noire Valerie ignites physical feelings Ly cannot comprehend.

No story quite grips me like one which I can imagine the author feeling a twinge of dread about releasing—one which will make me nervous as I read, with this nervousness giving me to know that the author has not reposed on “safe” material. I will not offer spoilers—but the reader must enter Read and Then Burn This prepared to feel discomfort.

I review the book at greater length on Medium (un-paywalled link).

[Anna Otto · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book over a week ago and am still thinking of it. A haunting coming of age story , the book focuses on Ly, a talented young dancer who is passing time by teaching kids in Boston and living with a few roommates while dreaming of something more. He becomes involved in two very different relationships, a man he sees as an ideal, and a woman who is a mystery - to him and to us. Ly is a bit of a mystery as well - most of all to himself. As he fumbles his way through the interactions with the two people pulling him in opposite directions, we can’t help but cringe for him as we remember our own youth and the mistakes made in the past. Weren’t we all 18 once upon a time? A psychological thriller, this book is full of questions about the nature of attraction, identity, and the dark pools of unknown within our unconscious mind.

[Shrike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A+E set the bar high, and this book did not disappoint. Another uncomfortably raw ball of emotions. The characters are complicated, slimy, and fascinating. I found myself torn between wanting to cheer on a character I liked and flinching at the awful decisions they make. I didn't find myself as intensely invested as I did with A + E, but I did really enjoy this read.

Thank you to the author and to BookSirens for the chance to read this book for free. I'm leaving this review of my own accord.

[Marnie Desdemona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, I will look in the mirror, and I find myself not recognizing the person I see in there. Such physical dissonance is not as common as another existential dread that comes when looking at the mirror within my own heart, as I sometimes feel like I don’t know who I am. That terrifyingly, I can look at those I love the most, and feel I like I don’t truly know them either. That there is so much beyond their surface I shall never touch despite wanting to completely hold the secrets of their heart. There is an inherent need within humans to understand things, to banish the darkness of the unknown with knowledge, and to unravel puzzles—it ignites something primal in our brains—but there is also a deep unease and fear that comes with the unknown. A gnawing loneliness to feel so utterly separate from everyone including your own self. It crawls under our skin like a thousand prickling spiders when we can’t understand something despite needing to know it with all our being.

I talk at such great lengths on these matters because I feel that is what this book boils down to as its core explorations: of showcasing people who don’t truly understand themselves and what they want, and people who can’t quite understand the people around them and what they want in turn. It is a tapestry woven of the messiness of being human, and how it is something that never really ends. Whether you are nineteen with wispy aspirations, or nearing forty and filled with bitter aloofness, a haunting specter of being disconnected from others and your self continues on—you can only ever glance at fragments of another’s portrait…fragments of your own portrait.

I will be discussing some aspects of the book’s characters and events in-depth going ahead: this will give you a much deeper cut picture of the book and what it conveys, but it will also spoil a lot of it, and has been marked accordingly. Proceed ahead only if such things don’t bother you very much, and if you enjoy seeing a work of art peeled open to its raw, bleeding heart before deciding to venture inside it.

Our main character is Ly, a nineteen-year-old dancer who once had great potential, but was cut short when he broke his leg during a performance: an injury caused due to his excessive, self-destructive behaviors to his body in seek of perfection in the art of his dance. This event sends Ly into a kind of limbo away from the path he always thought his life would lead. He moves to a new city; he becomes a dance teacher to young children; and even though his leg is healed he hesitates to push forward with his original ambitions. Yet, without that goal, there appears to be something missing in himself—he defined himself wholly by his dance and therefore without it who he is becomes hazy in the mirror of his heart.

To muddle more confusion into the life of our young protagonist are our other two major characters in the book, Colin and Valerie. Colin is a handsome, charming, and seemingly perfect dreamboat type who sweeps into Ly’s life, and shares his passion of dance. Meanwhile, Ly’s roommate Valerie is someone who so offputs him at first that the only thing he can note of liking about her are her hands, the rest of her coming off as abrasive, droll, irritating, and even repulsive. Smitten with Colin, and with a steady undercurrent of disgust for Valerie, here is where the confusion of the self really plays into things as Ly develops two very different kinds of relationships with Colin and Valerie. One relationship plays out mostly like a romance movie, and the other plays out as a primal, sexually confusing ravishing.

If you’ve read other works by Ryszard, you know by now he is a master of the huge-fucking-mess-of-a-human-being characters, so if you’re looking at things from a surface level perspective you might feel more annoyed than you should. Because often, you will see characters do and say things you don’t understand at all: things that might make you angry with them, disgusted by them, or feel general distaste for them overall. Again, that messiness is part of what is being explored here—of how hard it is to come to an understanding of yourself and those around you. The whole book of course is through Ly’s lense, so we are going through the most extreme version of this: though this fragmentation of understanding of the self is persistent throughout life, as a teenager it is its most volatile. Ly being a teenager also means a lot of the darker or more questionable events of the book get filtered through a lense of naivety that our protagonist brings with his youth.

To our protagonist, Colin is the perfect man: beautiful in a way that takes your breath way, intelligent and funny, one who you can talk to and engage with on the arts and passions, affluent to a degree, and a sweet soul to everyone around him. But he is twenty-six going after a nineteen-year-old. There is a power differential in age, in affluence (Ly is the barely scraping by with three roommates type), life experience, and influence—Colin has connections to a prestigious dance academy that could be Ly’s ticket back onto the path of his dance ambitions. Colin as a character is like listening to beautiful music that entrances your very being, but every so often you hear a wrong tone painfully screech out, and you wonder then what emotions are truly being conveyed by the one playing the song. He’s the perfect man, but he’ll also gently pressure you into the penetrative sex you’re apprehensive about, and even though you acquiesce a yes, he’ll conveniently ignore the extremely clear discomfort you have, and tells you it will feel good in time. And you do feel good in time, don’t you, so what’s it matter? He’ll get you a fake ID so you can go out drinking with him: you’re just a teenager, and he treats you as his equal, treats you as someone as mature as him, isn’t that wonderful? There are these constant layers of who a character thinks a person is (or who the character projects onto them and wants them to be in their heart), and the other truer aspects lurking below the surface. Projection is something that comes up a lot with Ly to Valerie.

While Ly and Colin are mostly the picture of a whirlwind romance, Ly and Valerie have only what appears to be a storm of bramble between them that later blossom into more brambles but with sex added in. In their encounters throughout the days in their apartment, Ly often shows disgust, contempt, and annoyance towards Valerie, and is offput as well by her sometimes inappropriate lack of personal space—with her being twice his age and him being assuredly gay. Still, little acts of kindness pass between them. Ly gets her takeout from a place she likes and brings it to her at her workplace, and she breaks down into weeping because of how little she has ever received such acts of consideration; she has spare tickets to a ballet that utterly entrances Ly; and on a freezing night in their drafty apartment, Ly lets her sleep in his bed for warmth. It is that act of sleeping together in the bed that starts a spiral of things to come with her. Nothing indecent happens at all…that first night. But it keeps happening. This person Ly is so offput by, coming to his door like a miserable child to crawl into his bed, and though he rarely says it, there is a palpable fascination in him for this woman past the abhorrence he feels. Not a desire in him for her, no, but an inescapable intrigue because so much of her feels fabricated and an act; so much of her is just confounding; she is incredibly simple and bland compared to his tastes, and yet there is still something so ungraspable about who she is as a person that sinks in like a thorny vine. She is a puzzle. She is something of constant frustration, yet he never turns her away. He always lets her into his room each night. And the night when things do evolve into a sexual encounter, he doesn’t stop her, doesn’t push her away…no…despite his disgust with her, despite his disgust with women, he merely projects another person onto her. This person a man. In his mind he turns her into a man, and everything burns white hot. He envisions her as nothing more than a pair of burning, phosphorous white hands that pleasure and explore his body—his sexual pleasure notably more intense, open, and all-encapsulating than the often restrained and less pleasured sexual experiences he has with Colin.

Within the book it is never quite clear the sincerity of many of the characters’ desires, or if they are all simply using each other for their own ends. Valerie is a deeply unhappy and lonely woman, and she uses Ly’s confusion and naivety to her own end, but she also seems sincerely moved by the little acts of kindness he has shown her. She can never truly have him—sexuality, age, personality, and attraction all misaligned for that fate—but she can engage in this facsimile of connection in her role as the man Ly projects onto her…a man whose name Ly can utter with complete love. She barely ever lets him speak during intercourse, and it could be because it is too painful—to hear Ly speak is to know he truly doesn’t care about her at all and only his own projections. That there is nothing real between them despite the burning intensity of the acts they commit together.

That we have Ly, who talks of love and infatuation with Colin, but can’t stop cheating on him with someone he can barely stand the company of, that he keeps seeming to skip around the audition Colin wants him to perform to get into that prestigious dance academy. That dance is a twisting thing throughout the story: it was Ly’s mother who first pushed him into it, who intensely grilled it into him throughout his youth with him often losing out on normal social interactions and experiences a child should get. Despite his passion and enjoyment of dance, you wonder sometimes if it is truly what he wants, or if it is just the only thing he knows—that dance has been a part of his life for so long that he cannot define himself without it being present. He needs it to function. He talks of how dance helps him feel complete as a person, helps him understand himself as person. Yet, what Ly understands of himself was originally pushed upon him by others. Ly can often feel like a spinning top: it appears as if the motion is his own, but he was spun by another, and the movements he makes…they mostly come from the push of those who press into him, or the knockback of him crashing into them. Alone, he moves little out of place, like a satellite waiting to be dragged into the orbit of others.

Then there’s Colin, who deep within the book, admits how he first went after Ly because Ly wasn’t someone who just wanted sex, someone easy to get into bed. Colin, who seems to make everyone melt around him with his words, who can effortlessly wrap people around his finger with his charms, felt a drive in him for Ly—for this little puzzle to solve. He could get anyone into his bed, but to have someone who wouldn’t go into it right away was against what he knew of himself. That there’s a small scene where Colin hands Ly his fake ID telling him it’s the one he found that looks the most like Ly, and Ly comments on how it looks nothing like himself. It could just be Colin teasing Ly, but it also makes it more clearly feel like Colin is manufacturing this idea of Ly too—that even Mr. Perfect is the same as the other two messy souls.

No matter the emotional or physical intimacy that passes between the characters, there is something missing, as it feels like none of them truly understand or know each other beyond the performances they put on. It’s all projection, idealism, ideation. That’s something truly heartbreaking, because you can impart this deep longing for true connection bleeding throughout the pages, a painful longing to find something to hold onto within oneself. A dreadful haunting looming over, like what you experience when you do not understand why you feel a certain way, or why someone is who they are. It eats at your mind like a parasite, digging deeper the more entangled you find your own being with another person’s.

Do all these webs get neatly untangled? Do the characters come to an understanding of themselves and those around them? Maybe in another book, yes, but seeing how this book is a very realistic look at the mess of being human and intimately involving yourself with other humans, little is learned. Little is changed. Little understanding is ever to be found. This disconnection is at least apparent to some of the characters, like Ly, who thrown about in the whirlwind of confusion from all the events happening in his life, gets caught up in a party with some other young people. They do drugs, listen to music, make out, and they all seem so empty and vapid to him, but at the same time he probably seems the same to them, that they probably have worlds inside them that he will never touch. That Ly wants to be seen. To be known. To be understood. So he merely dances for them all: that is the only language he knows, the only real way to express what he feels is his identity. He can recognize the emptiness of it all, of the game of puzzles and trying to pick them apart inside yourself and in others, but he can’t free himself from it. None of them can.

As someone who has deeply struggled to understand myself, and someone who has been deeply entangled in a web of trying to understand others—of the complexity of navigating pseudo-romantic and pseudo-sexual relationships—I feel this book is a perfect exploration of the fucking mess of it all in a bite-size package. All of us want to be seen, and all of us want to believe we truly see others, and this book can maybe make you feel a little less like a failure or broken as you realize this is the struggle we all go through. We can spend our whole lives slowly putting in the puzzle pieces of our self and those we love, but at the end of the day, we will always be a few pieces short…or the picture we complete is not the one we envisioned. There, with the puzzle complete, do we then regret that we put it together in the first place?

It does no good to be good.

Those are the words printed in large, black text on the back of my copy of the book, glaring like some inscription written in ancient stone—something to find upon a mausoleum or a gate into Hell. It is something Valerie says, and conveys some of her bitterness, but also how we can get lost in the game of human and self-connection. She is not a heartless person at her core—she is one to weep over the kindness of a gift—but she has given into the despairing chaos of existence. What good is it to do anything if nothing ever changes, if you can’t escape, and if nobody really cares? Nobody is there to save you. We are alone, absolutely, from birth into death. That is something to ponder at the end of the book too, witnessing these messy people crumple into themselves, of what to do with yourself in the face of this storm. But, like a lightbulb that flashes out leaving us alone in the dark, we are not given answers. We are left, in the absence and the deafening silence, to stare into a future without shape or form…left standing before the mirror of our hearts to find nothing in the reflection but a pasted together collage of ourselves so fragile that a moth’s wingbeat could send it crumbling. There is nothing we can do but glue ourselves together, and to stare out at others through the cage of singular, lonely consciousness—of hoping through the bars you can truly see them. Of hoping that you are seen back as well.

[C.L. Methvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not like the protagonist, and I am elated to have disliked the protagonist.

Ly is a nineteen-year-old reprobate whose world we are dropped into not long after a life-altering accident leaves him incapable of dancing (his passion and work). Eventually he heals enough to step back into the scene, but after his contemporaries have surpassed him and a sense of time lost starts to paint how he views his prospects.
This offers a general framework for his attitude and behavior, but not enough to forgive him.

Read and Then Burn This was an exceptional read. It feels hard to definitively classify, but in my best efforts: slice-of-life, somewhat (like 30%) character study, and "romance" about (failing) relationships and the struggles therein. I would go so far as to say it's also quite modernist in its style, wavering between the styles of Virginia Woolf in many ways, and James Joyce (à la Ulysses's "Penelope") in the sexual scenes.
An example I particularly enjoyed:
"Then I feel one of his hands go down—he takes my hand, pulling me out of him and into an anesthetized dream of my own finger being traced against my neck—cheek—that's when I tremble—. Like fish, like sea, like salty milk, like dirty coins, like wet dog;" . I find these familiar-if-vaguely-un/relatable sensations the perfect mixture of "erratic but grounded" that really elevates a scene or character meant to be lost in thought and sense.

This book also exists in an uncomfortable conversation: sex is complicated. Sex for lost and dejected queers trying to find themselves is especially complicated. And there is Ly, a gay boy in the middle of it all. You watch him as he navigates tenuous relationships with himself, his new boyfriend, and the forty-year-old roommate who he definitely isn't attracted to (by virtue of being a woman) but still has sex with in a mutually-abusive relationship.

Ly is a cruel person, ultimately: he cheats on his partner, he emotionally misleads his roommate, he exacerbates his own misery by choice, but admittedly I do feel sorry for him, because despite all of this, his actions are the products of a broken queer struggling desperately to figure himself out. While being [CW:raped] by his roommate Valerie, he cannot help but enjoy the sensation, the unfamiliar rush; though he disconnects himself from the situation by imagining the hands disembodied, and reimagining his aggressor as a man—the book then does one of the most clever in-text reflections of this I've seen by literally changing Valerie's pronouns to he/him to reflect the disconnect and/or altered reality Ly is enduring to satisfy/(enjoy?) the experience as best he can.

I could go on, but then there would be a lot more spoiler tags.
Merey's Read and Then Burn This is infuriating, uncomfortable, controversial in its relationships, and unforgiving of its characters. For these reasons and more, it is an incredible little microscope into a life falling apart. The beginning is a bit slow (exposition and all) but once the relationships begin to falter around 80 pages, 50% in, the narrative really steps on the gas. I want to talk about the ending because I think it was an incredibly powerful choice to end as it did—but I won't since that would be far too much a spoiler.

However, for my love of the modernist elements, I found them effective, though strangely scattered between other sections not given nearly the same level of introspective detail, which made the novella a little tonally jarring at times. A smaller criticism would be the strange, intermittent manner of censorship: Ly curses frequently, though sometimes opts to substitute a word in moments of thought ("fuck" as "fudge" for instance), then in others will hyphenate the word ("f-g") despite using it elsewhere, or in some cases replacing it entirely with underscores. I see the point in why this might be done, but found it strange that it was done (or not done) so inconsistently.

If you like sad stories, queer yearning, problematic relationships, mutual destruction, and characters whose actions anger you, this book has everything you're looking for.

[Jun Nozaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Read and Then Burn This" is the next installment of Merey's tiny format novellas. As with the previous release, A + E the book is beautifully designed and layed out.

The writing flows effortlessly, much like how I imagine the protagonist Ly's movements to be when he's dancing. Merey sets the stage efficiently, electing to keep the novella's focus sharp and on point. As I read on, I suddenly found myself facing the unexpected psychological payload that Merey wove into the story. The story's exploration of love, relationship, sex, and attraction affected me on a personal level; those topics usually stay relatively unexamined in my own psyche and seeing them explored so casually definitely made me reexamine my own experience and attitude.

I highly recommend reading this book, there is no judgement or moral prescription here, just an invitation to think about the connections we all have more actively.