all my marbles

You pick up Sex Goblin in your local indie bookstore and the first thing you notice is that it is red. It takes being red more seriously than any book you have ever seen before – even the pages are the same violent colour as the cover. 

I have to admit I bought the book because of its presentation. The red pages, the short and intriguing title, the way it would look on my bookshelf. A quick glance at reader reviews on GoodReads will reveal that many other buyers had similar motivations. Thus became the central question of my reading of Sex Goblin: why red? Surely this design choice ate up a sizeable chunk of the budget Nightboat Books allocated to its publication. What did Lauren Cook have to say to his publisher to convince them to take this sort of risk? 

Sex Goblin paints a vague portrait of a person through vignettes. It gives the effect of watching someone shower through fogged glass. It is both intimate and obscure, both accessible and somewhat impenetrable. One wonders: what is really going on here? The stories and musings are simple, often told in the tone of social media ephemera, and because of this the reader finds themself questioning the hand behind the pen. The character of the author is implied through the voice and tone of the writing, which attacks themes of violence and carnal sexuality with childlike indifference. The feeling of reading Cook’s writing is not unlike the feeling of being a confused tween with unsupervised Internet access for the first time. There is both freedom and danger there. 

This slim red book is something like the layers of construction paper I would fold, staple, and illustrate as a child. It’s charming, and, at the same time, the startling colour of it reminds one of violence, passion, anger, and lust. It blends childlike innocence and humour with startling darkness – suggesting an author who is naive to their imposing subject matter and capturing it with the tools they have. Why not? We take life as it comes. 

I liked Sex Goblin! I gave it 3.75 stars for doing something lovely and subtle without entirely blowing my mind. 

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