The Boy Avengers

by Karl Flinders

You''ve heard of strange and sensuous practices among schoolboys before--but they pale into insignificance before the fiendish, blackly funny machinations of Grant Lattimer when he sets out to perpetrate an elaborate sexual revenge on the rapists of his beloved!

Genres: Erotica, M M Romance, Gay, LGBT

218 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2010

Reviews

[Julio Genao · Rating 4 out of 5]

As both a chapbook of baroque hypocrisy and a kind of Venn diagram of guileless amorality, this book is in select company.

It's like a gay Gatsby through a glass darkly coke bottle, plus syphilis.

But I find the prospect of explaining my admiration of it to be more painful than the act of reading its comically outraged reviews.

Suffice to say that if you did not find it hilarious, I feel badly for you.

But only a little bit.

Because you can't be both the subject of a black satire and its clever audience, can you?

No. You can't.

You can hate the ever-living fuck out of it, though. So.

There's that.

[Emma Sea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um, not sure how to review this. Maybe with some reader advisories. Do not read if you have trigger issues with:

Rape
Underage rape
Underage sex
Bullying
STDs
Tasting a dead man's cum
Giant hanging balls
A "handsome alligator attache case [which contains] neatly stored in rows, several flesh-colored plastic representations of erect penises. And a small machine."
Coke bottles put to uses for which they were not orginally intended

[Lenore · Rating 1 out of 5]

AKA: The Big Book of Statutory Rape OR The Big Book of Male Genitals and Assholes.

Highly disturbing.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been wracking my brain trying to figure how to write a review extolling the virtues of a book filled with loving descriptions of pederasty without coming off like a creep. And I just can't. I'm not sure it's possible. So I'm not going to try. I'll just write what I think, and if that makes me a creep, then so be it.

First off, this book is batshit insane. Seriously, it is unbelievably obscene. It takes a special kind of psychotic courage to write a book about schoolboys running around raping each other and 11-year-old boys soliciting the advances of 69-year-old men. It takes a special kind of genius to make said book funny and engaging. It has the same can't-look-away appeal of crime scene photos or stories of people being eaten by crocodiles. Everything that happens in this book is horrible. Everything. And I'm ashamed of myself for having so thoroughly enjoyed it. It's just that it's so well-written and clever, and awful. So, so awful, guys. But so good.

[Jenn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate this book with every fiber of my being. If this was a paperback, I'd light it on fire and throw it in the dumpster. This goes on my most hated books ever list along with A Confederacy of Dunces & The Story of O. I despise this book more than I can say.

That's all the review I've got right now.

[Santino Hassell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was creepy, but engaging. I wanted to know what would happen, but nothing happened quite the way I expected, and when things happened, it kind of made my skin crawl and I would shudder in horror. The author had an obvious obsession with enormous balls and statutory rape. I think what happened is, Flinders read Tom Brown's Schooldays, wrote a porny fanfic, and then changed the names. It is the Fifty Shades of Grey of classic YA.

[Rhockman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Empieza como una historia de humor negro y cinismo con descripciones pornográficas. De golpe se acaba el argumento y es puro porno. Todo el mundo es gay.

[Jon O · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was going through The Boy Avengers, one name kept popping up for comparison. James Lear. Somehow, just like any of James Lear's work, everyone in the book would have sex. However, in Karl Flinders's writing, even the female characters would be doing so. So, be warned for those who would want to concentrate on only male-male interaction.

Somehow, I preferred Karl Flinders's work, minus the typing and spelling errors. Maybe because all the characters in the book would be described as gorgeous. One could not help but to picture Jack Foster, the tutor and also Jeff, Grant's love interest in the book, who was sexually assaulted by his schoolmates. They were described to be so beautiful that I needed to know what would happen to them next. It kept me glued to the book. The revenge (the plot) was simple. Perhaps believable too, as Grant was said to be extremely rich.

However, there was only so much of sexual description one could absorb from reading a book like this. Eventually, I found myself bored, with little interest in other sexual conquests described at the end.

Love the cover.

[Roof Beam Reader (Adam) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of transgressive literature, especially in the LGBT genre. This is another that I won't/can't recommend to anyone, however. I believe this one was auto-recommended to me though some kind of population (Amazon? Goodreads?) based on reading Dennis Cooper, Samuel Delaney, etc. Like their works, this one is bold to the point of being inappropriate. Unlike Cooper and Delaney, it is a bit more gratuitously pornographic, in my opinion, though it is not poorly written. There are even some redeeming qualities (hence the 3 stars), such as the fascinating intellectual narrator who is psychologically clinical and whose personal desire for retribution, though not recognized except through his "avenging" a schoolmate, drives the entire narrative. In many ways, this book read like something out of the 19th Century - I had to keep reminding myself that the book was written in the last decade. Anyhow, if you're not offended by graphic descriptions of sexual acts, including underage/inter-generational acts, rape, murder, etc., then go ahead and give this one a try. It's not for the traditionally curious, though. I think I appreciated it mostly because I'm an experienced transgressive reader and could appreciate the writing (though very poorly proofed/edited) and the subtextual arguments without getting too distracted by/offended by the surface subject matter, which is going to be unpalatable to most people. It was also laugh-out-loud funny at times. I marked a few passages that were downright clever.

[ziegelstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schwer einzuordnen... aber das hier ist so übertrieben verdorben dass es geradezu ins Komische/Lachhafte überschwenkt. Raffiniert.

[Daniel]

So so NOT what I was expecting.

Recommended for:
Prosecuting attorney in the people v Karl Flinders.
Karl Flinders' prison psychologist.

NO ONE ELSE.