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The Dangerous Husband
As clever as it is heartbreaking, this comic masterpiece--now in paperback--tells the story of a marriage that is not, after all, exactly like anyone else's. Or is it?
In The Dangerous Husband, they meet and almost immediately fall in love. Like everyone, they have been alone. He is perfect for her - charming and sexy and awkward and sweet. They are forty; it is time for them to marry and shelter each other. When the honeymoon ends, as honeymoons always do, real life begins, with its surprises. He trips up stairs, falls going down. He cooks a tasty dinner and the kitchen ends up looking like a slaughterhouse. Absorbed in sexual experimentation, he shatters the coffee table. He tenderly wrenches her neck; he breaks her arm. It was turning out that my husband's dishevelment was incomparable, potent, ramifying. It could destroy whole little worlds. It will surely destroy her. Unless she can kill him first.
In The Dangerous Husband, they meet and almost immediately fall in love. Like everyone, they have been alone. He is perfect for her - charming and sexy and awkward and sweet. They are forty; it is time for them to marry and shelter each other. When the honeymoon ends, as honeymoons always do, real life begins, with its surprises. He trips up stairs, falls going down. He cooks a tasty dinner and the kitchen ends up looking like a slaughterhouse. Absorbed in sexual experimentation, he shatters the coffee table. He tenderly wrenches her neck; he breaks her arm. It was turning out that my husband's dishevelment was incomparable, potent, ramifying. It could destroy whole little worlds. It will surely destroy her. Unless she can kill him first.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
March 4, 2008
The title of Jane Shapiro’s second novel, The Dangerous Husband, lends it the feel of a bad made-for-TV movie on Lifetime about a seemingly normal insurance salesman who becomes controlling and eventually kills his wife. Not so. Rather, the book is about two forty-something New Yorkers who meet at a party and fall quickly into marriage. “Help me,” Dennis says upon meeting the narrator, a woman who is never named, ”I’m a mess.” He’s not kidding.
The danger that the title is referring to isn’t psycho or sinister, but rather scattered and klutzy. For all those worried that they’ll marry someone who will scam them out of their life savings or cheat on them with their secretary, this book offers a scarier thought: What if the person you marry turns out to be an accident prone spaz?
The narrator slowly starts to see the truth as time and time again Dennis attracts misfortune. Dennis falls through a glass coffee table in the middle of sex, bloodying his genitals. Dennis rescues kittens, only to end up killing them by mistake. Dennis tries to make breakfast and somehow ends up breaking his new wife’s toe in seventeen places. The narrator surmises it’s only a matter of time before Denis’ inadvertent malice becomes fatal. “I gotta stop him,” she eventually thinks to herself. “He really needs to be dead.”
Written with an acerbically black sense of humor, Shapiro shows a grim picture of what may be waiting for those who jump into marriage too quickly. And really, isn’t marrying a man who inadvertently kills kittens a fate worse than anything in those Lifetime movies?
The danger that the title is referring to isn’t psycho or sinister, but rather scattered and klutzy. For all those worried that they’ll marry someone who will scam them out of their life savings or cheat on them with their secretary, this book offers a scarier thought: What if the person you marry turns out to be an accident prone spaz?
The narrator slowly starts to see the truth as time and time again Dennis attracts misfortune. Dennis falls through a glass coffee table in the middle of sex, bloodying his genitals. Dennis rescues kittens, only to end up killing them by mistake. Dennis tries to make breakfast and somehow ends up breaking his new wife’s toe in seventeen places. The narrator surmises it’s only a matter of time before Denis’ inadvertent malice becomes fatal. “I gotta stop him,” she eventually thinks to herself. “He really needs to be dead.”
Written with an acerbically black sense of humor, Shapiro shows a grim picture of what may be waiting for those who jump into marriage too quickly. And really, isn’t marrying a man who inadvertently kills kittens a fate worse than anything in those Lifetime movies?
August 4, 2018
What a wonderful trainwreck this couple was! I would pay good money for a memoir by Bianca the frog.
Want to Read
April 6, 2017If you like big little lies
August 25, 2010
A darkly comical book that invokes a nail-biting fear for the safety and well-being of any innocent creature, be it human or animal, that falls (with great misfortune) into the life of Dennis, the aptly titled 'Dangerous Husband'. A cat. A dog. A frog. Three previous wives. All are, or become, unintentional victims of this otherwise well-meaning, caring man who carries with him the curse of extreme clumsiness. This is the story of the unknowing wife number four, who only learns of all her predecessors and their ill-fated endings after years of being her husband's accidental bull's eye...at a seeming point of no return. Hence the introduction of the hit man.
This book was rather unique. Despite its somewhat morbid plot, it contained a lot of dry, often blatant, sometimes twisted and so-glad-that-wasn't-me humor. It was intended to induce chuckles (if not all-out laughter) and to entertain, and I thought that Jane Shapiro was very successful executing this idea in the face of so much injury.
Despite the constant string of crazy accidents, this book also managed to maintain some realistic credibility. It seemed plausible that there exists an oaf like Dennis who accidentally breaks an unwilling person's bone on occasion, as well as a hanger-on who feels sorry for and tolerance for that person's foibles. I sympathized both with the husband and his inborn lack of grace, and of course with his beleagured and often injured wife.
All in all, a very different take on the relationship novel. A fun book to read.
This book was rather unique. Despite its somewhat morbid plot, it contained a lot of dry, often blatant, sometimes twisted and so-glad-that-wasn't-me humor. It was intended to induce chuckles (if not all-out laughter) and to entertain, and I thought that Jane Shapiro was very successful executing this idea in the face of so much injury.
Despite the constant string of crazy accidents, this book also managed to maintain some realistic credibility. It seemed plausible that there exists an oaf like Dennis who accidentally breaks an unwilling person's bone on occasion, as well as a hanger-on who feels sorry for and tolerance for that person's foibles. I sympathized both with the husband and his inborn lack of grace, and of course with his beleagured and often injured wife.
All in all, a very different take on the relationship novel. A fun book to read.
July 28, 2012
I am ashamed to say that I didn't finish this book and will very likely never finis this book. It is definitely not up my alley. If you like gratuitous over use of excessively pretentious language, then you might find this intriguing. It's not a matter of vocabulary so much as it is a question of deliberately applying the most round about way of stating the simplest things. That and the 200 word sentences. The author is exceptionally found of paragraph length structures with nary a period among a sea of commas.
I will say that I made it to page 39 before I set the thing aside while the front cover claims that something worth "bursting out laughing" over could be found on page 54. The few parts of what I read that weren't so clouded as to be opaque carried an intense sexual undertone to the. Some degree of the husbands -- not personality, say character -- was beginning to filter through the narrator's about the time I closed the book. It was starting to feel more concrete by that point but the clouded daze that went before was too much for me to wade through.
This is the kind of thing that I would expect to see an English professor delightfully inflicting upon there students. I can read Lovecraft's stuff. I can read Tolkien. This stuff burned me out in 39 pages.
I will say that I made it to page 39 before I set the thing aside while the front cover claims that something worth "bursting out laughing" over could be found on page 54. The few parts of what I read that weren't so clouded as to be opaque carried an intense sexual undertone to the. Some degree of the husbands -- not personality, say character -- was beginning to filter through the narrator's about the time I closed the book. It was starting to feel more concrete by that point but the clouded daze that went before was too much for me to wade through.
This is the kind of thing that I would expect to see an English professor delightfully inflicting upon there students. I can read Lovecraft's stuff. I can read Tolkien. This stuff burned me out in 39 pages.
June 10, 2011
Super quick and twisted read about the dark side of the institution of marriage and self-preservation. She is 40 and never married, a professional free-lance photographer who has all but given up on the elusive fairy tale happily ever after ending... until she happens to meet and fall swiftly in love with Dennis at a Thanksgiving dinner. He is single and adorable and independently wealthy, and as soon as they marry what was once charming becomes irritating - his clumsiness for example, goes beyond disarming to a mortal threat. Who will kill who first?
January 31, 2010
The husband, Dennis, is an accidental wife abuser... he is so clumsy he is always hurting his wife.. falling into her, tripping her, jabbing her with things. It is a hilarious book about a very serious topic.
May 18, 2011
Twisted and darkly funny. A woman has turned a blind eye to the man she marries because he offers security and proserity. After the wedding, however, their true selves appear and if you pay attention you realize she is just as terrible as he is, though she never admits this. Great ending.
April 26, 2013
I almost didn't finish it, but about around page 60 I finally laughed. I think she is a little long-winded, but when I laughed, it was out loud, and I'll probably recall the husband character every so often and smile.
October 28, 2014
I especially liked the development and revealing of the characters and the slow building of suspence
and fear.
and fear.
March 11, 2017
The Dangerous Husband by Jane Shapiro is the story of a 40-year-old woman, who "had never managed to be married" but finds herself falling in love with a man she meets at a Thanksgiving dinner party. The courtship is swift, and, after a brief, passionate honeymoon period, they start to really get to know one another. And that's when all the "accidents" start taking place.
Even before the marriage, only a couple weeks after their first meeting, he loses his job and decides to live off an inheritance and write a novel. Soon after the marriage, the wife begins to learn other things that surprise her - he'd been married several times before, he has a certain clumsiness that becomes more pronounced with time - but the many good characteristics, such as his desire to please her at all times, with gifts, attentiveness and affection, keep her firmly committed to the marriage ... at first. But the clumsiness that accompanies these attentions soon puts her at physical risk.
Taken in a purely metaphorical sense, this is a fairly clever story. For a woman marrying for the first time at 40 when she meets someone charming, in a way giving in to societal expectations, perhaps after years of listening to questions like, "When are you going to get married? Don't you want a nice husband? Don't you want someone to grow old with?" and, as a consequence, not only not being happier than when single, but actually risking serious injury as a result of the union - it shows us that the grass isn't always greener. And the negatives keep piling up, as friends fall away and even the household pets meet unpleasant fates.
But there was just something about the writing I didn't like. The jacket description calls it a "witty, dark, brilliantly funny novel," which I think gave me the wrong expectations. It was certainly dark, somewhat witty, but I found nothing at all funny about it. On the contrary, it made me rather sad: sad for the wife, who felt, even at 40, that her life would not be complete unless she tried marriage on for size; sad for the husband, who had married so many times, hoping to find the real thing, only to drive his wives away out of fear for their safety; and of course, sad that this kind of story has to be told. That being a lifelong single person still carries so much stigma.
Even before the marriage, only a couple weeks after their first meeting, he loses his job and decides to live off an inheritance and write a novel. Soon after the marriage, the wife begins to learn other things that surprise her - he'd been married several times before, he has a certain clumsiness that becomes more pronounced with time - but the many good characteristics, such as his desire to please her at all times, with gifts, attentiveness and affection, keep her firmly committed to the marriage ... at first. But the clumsiness that accompanies these attentions soon puts her at physical risk.
Taken in a purely metaphorical sense, this is a fairly clever story. For a woman marrying for the first time at 40 when she meets someone charming, in a way giving in to societal expectations, perhaps after years of listening to questions like, "When are you going to get married? Don't you want a nice husband? Don't you want someone to grow old with?" and, as a consequence, not only not being happier than when single, but actually risking serious injury as a result of the union - it shows us that the grass isn't always greener. And the negatives keep piling up, as friends fall away and even the household pets meet unpleasant fates.
But there was just something about the writing I didn't like. The jacket description calls it a "witty, dark, brilliantly funny novel," which I think gave me the wrong expectations. It was certainly dark, somewhat witty, but I found nothing at all funny about it. On the contrary, it made me rather sad: sad for the wife, who felt, even at 40, that her life would not be complete unless she tried marriage on for size; sad for the husband, who had married so many times, hoping to find the real thing, only to drive his wives away out of fear for their safety; and of course, sad that this kind of story has to be told. That being a lifelong single person still carries so much stigma.
August 19, 2025
I enjoyed the writing style but the husband character is so over-the-top that it’s hard to be drawn into the storytelling. Still, it was good beach reading.
Side note: This had a wonderfully devious cover quotation, where the quoted person said they “burst out laughing on page 54 and couldn’t stop until the end.” And this absolutely made me want to read the book and see what was on page 54. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a blunt tactic to ensnare me in a book, but it worked.
As another note, I didn’t think page 54 was all it was cracked up to be. Not that it wasn’t funny, but I didn’t think it was funnier than the other things leading up to that point.
面白いけどキャラクターはやばいすぎて話に構うのが難しくなる。ビーチに読むのがちょうどいい
Side note: This had a wonderfully devious cover quotation, where the quoted person said they “burst out laughing on page 54 and couldn’t stop until the end.” And this absolutely made me want to read the book and see what was on page 54. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen such a blunt tactic to ensnare me in a book, but it worked.
As another note, I didn’t think page 54 was all it was cracked up to be. Not that it wasn’t funny, but I didn’t think it was funnier than the other things leading up to that point.
面白いけどキャラクターはやばいすぎて話に構うのが難しくなる。ビーチに読むのがちょうどいい
May 23, 2021
Made it to page 27 before I quit - and I'm not a quitter when it comes to reading. A previous reader had noted in the margin "132 words in this sentence." That reader, I assume, had also circled typos. In my opinion, the author has poor writing skills: used big, rare (?) words, one page was one whole paragraph and then a paragraph with two words. Never did find out what their names were so it was no surprise that she called him "lover" or "new lover" all the time.
December 30, 2024
Dark comedy. The husband is such a ridiculous klutz that he unintentionally ends up hurting his wife in the process. Personally I would have gome at his manhood with a branding iron the second he pulled that drinking water while peeing after sex nonsense. It is funny and alarming and I really hope Bianca the frog lives on in infamy.
December 28, 2017
Wow. This had different writing than I’m used to but it was really good. It leaves you making your own opinions on their relationship. I mean, you can tell that Dennis was mentally abusive but yet not......it’s just very interesting, all the thoughts and feelings the wife goes through.
January 27, 2019
I fricking loved this one! It was funny, oddly heartbreaking, it moved incredibly fast, and the prose was just really tidy. It has me thinking a lot about marriage (I’m not married as of now) and offers unique insight for singles and married folks.
May 19, 2019
Jag hade svårt att få kontakt med karaktärerna i boken. De enda jag kände någon egentlig sympati för är deras husdjur. Tyckte inte den var komisk alls och hade vissa svårigheter att tvinga mig igenom den, tur att den var relativt kort.
March 31, 2022
Kind of hated this book. I found the narrator to be annoying and just straight up rude. I felt bad for the poor husband, he was merely existing and the whole book consisted of what was considered his faults? I don’t blame him for anything
Read
November 28, 2021good but felt padded
December 5, 2021
Wow! That was different! Seriously black comedy, utterly great.
August 29, 2022
Strange book, both characters sound unwell, has that unreliable narrator feel.
December 21, 2022
Really interesting story—original. Not very well written. And the ending was . . . disappointing?
September 1, 2023
It’s a dark comedic story of a train-wreck husband, a cat, dog, and frog. But who will kill who? The husband kill the wife or vice-versa. Are all these accidents really clumsy “accidents.” ???
October 11, 2024
I don’t know wtf this book was but it wasn’t funny
September 14, 2013
This is a deliciously dark and mordant comedy. It gets increasingly darker and over the top as you get further into it, and for me, that was a big part of the attraction. I love the language and the deadpan delivery of events in the story, and while there were a few moments when I considered giving up on it, I was always rewarded by soldiering on. There were many places where I laughed, guffawed, and even sputtered out loud. My own decidedly UNdangerous husband couldn't imagine what I was reading in bed, and I was at a loss to explain myself; taken out of context, the lines that tickled my funny bone weren't amusing at all. It's the ensemble of dark humor, oddball characters (including an albino frog), utterly implausible circumstances and the occasional swerve into insanity that kept me reading, and laughing, right up to the final denouement. The end was a double treat due to a well-executed twist in the final chapter. I will definitely look for more books by this author.
January 10, 2012
Thinking about teaching this book in my twisted domestic course Fall 2011. Is it domestic violence? We're never provided with a clear answer, and that can be the confusing part! Some of the moments where I wanted the narrator to expound were glossed over, which is why I gave the book a 4 instead of a 5. When she beings contemplating murder, it seems like she's only had one frying pan dropped on her toe accidentally, but she claims there are other incidents, which aren't described to us. Those descriptions could have made a huge difference!
November, 2011:
I'm finishing up teaching this book, and I have found that working with students and being responsible for answering their questions, there was much more to the book than I originally thought, mostly in the word choices and themes that come and go appropriately.
November, 2011:
I'm finishing up teaching this book, and I have found that working with students and being responsible for answering their questions, there was much more to the book than I originally thought, mostly in the word choices and themes that come and go appropriately.
August 21, 2015
This is the story of a marriage gone wrong. Jane Shapiro created two quirky, over the top characters who fall madly in love, only to realize that the grim reality of everyday life leaves one's beloved wanting. Most of us in long-term relationships have been there, and after a period of initial disappointment we have learned to adjust our expectations and to compromise. But what happens when two lovers are unable to arrive at a point of harmony, yet are unable to leave each other? Shapiro shows us in a dark comedy of errors and misunderstandings. At times fantastical, there is an unstated understanding that, to a much minor degree, the story of this marriage is the story of any marriage. In some ways Shapiro's writing reminds me a little bit of Atwood, delightful, but not quite as subtle. Solid 3.5 stars from me.
April 10, 2014
I have never read a story quite like this before, LOL! The identity of the narrator is not revealed. When she reveals the name of her husband, Dennis, it was a big LOL moment since that is my beloved husband's name. The couple was also married on our wedding anniversary. The book is written by the point of view of the narrator, the wife, and while the husband is revealed to be a "dangerous man" the narrator is no prize as a wife. I was in a hurry to read this story because of library due dates. I think I really need to go back and read again, I think it would be helpful in processing this story.
December 3, 2015
I like the Jane Shapiro's writing style a lot. Lotta commas. Really heavy on commas. She also has an incredible vocabulary. Lugubrious is one of my favorite words after reading this book.
The plot tries to capture isolationism in marriage, the feeling of true love versus finding somebody that'll do the job. Unfortunately the titular husband in 'The Dangerous Husband' is just extremely clumsy. I can see where the author was attempting to go with this book and I liked a lot of it, but it left me less than overwhelmed at the end. Not even whelmed. Prose was nice and it was pretty compelling from chapter to chapter.
"I'm a voyeur for everyday gracefulness"
The plot tries to capture isolationism in marriage, the feeling of true love versus finding somebody that'll do the job. Unfortunately the titular husband in 'The Dangerous Husband' is just extremely clumsy. I can see where the author was attempting to go with this book and I liked a lot of it, but it left me less than overwhelmed at the end. Not even whelmed. Prose was nice and it was pretty compelling from chapter to chapter.
"I'm a voyeur for everyday gracefulness"
May 28, 2007
i picked this book up years ago when i lived in seattle the first time. it was part of my new, self imposed reading program called 'read a book by its cover.' because, let's face it...i'm a visual person and am easily convinced by cover designs that appeal to my sensibilities.
this here book has won two categories with me: 1. proving that you can judge a book by its cover 2. being the book that started and ended the 'read a book by its cover' program. i'm a lazy reader.
this here book has won two categories with me: 1. proving that you can judge a book by its cover 2. being the book that started and ended the 'read a book by its cover' program. i'm a lazy reader.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews