What do you think?
Rate this book
Love Machine
Discover the real underbelly of the golden mile, Kings Cross, in Love Machine by Clint Caward.
Kings Cross is a circus of desire, and Spencer has a ringside seat.
In an underground sex shop he sees it all: the buck's parties and streetwalkers, the drunks and the judges, the trannies, the junkies, the chokers. All types come through the doors and it's Spencer's poorly paid job to sell them what they want.
What Spencer wants is less straightforward. He makes figurines of Jesus with tentacles, writes revenge poetry and plans a film about the Immaculate Conception starring the blow-up dolls he lives with. Drifting between his dysfunctional family, the shop with its seedy cast of muscle-boys and amateur criminals, and the misfits who populate his apartment block, Spencer doesn't really know what he's looking for.
All that changes when Livia walks down the stairs. But can a daughter of the Cross provide salvation?
A love story set in a sex shop, Love Machine is a candid, confronting but also very funny first novel about the strange and familiar business of desire.
Kings Cross is a circus of desire, and Spencer has a ringside seat.
In an underground sex shop he sees it all: the buck's parties and streetwalkers, the drunks and the judges, the trannies, the junkies, the chokers. All types come through the doors and it's Spencer's poorly paid job to sell them what they want.
What Spencer wants is less straightforward. He makes figurines of Jesus with tentacles, writes revenge poetry and plans a film about the Immaculate Conception starring the blow-up dolls he lives with. Drifting between his dysfunctional family, the shop with its seedy cast of muscle-boys and amateur criminals, and the misfits who populate his apartment block, Spencer doesn't really know what he's looking for.
All that changes when Livia walks down the stairs. But can a daughter of the Cross provide salvation?
A love story set in a sex shop, Love Machine is a candid, confronting but also very funny first novel about the strange and familiar business of desire.
- GenresRomance
First published January 1, 2010
3 people are currently reading
10 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 20, 2010
This is my first review here. I live in Sydney not far from Kings Cross so I might be a bit biased towards this book. I’ve commented on it already at The Book Abyss, where I admitted, that I was attracted to the hot pink cover. And, if all you want is a voyeuristic trip into the daily workings of an underground Kings Cross sex shop full of drug addicts, perverts, schizophrenics, homeless prostitutes, petty criminals and abysmally low paying cash in hand work, then you won’t be disappointed. The main character, Spencer, works the graveyard shift, serves the wide variety of nocturnal customers, and battles boredom by attempting to retell the life of Jesus starring blow up dolls. On the surface the film with the dolls is funny, but it also sets up an intriguing religious subtext. The setting is bleak and realistic. This guy obviously spent a lot of time in these places. Just as we think there’s no hope a young girl selling herself down on William street enters the story. The writing is unexpectedly poetic in its simplicity, with really beautiful imagery. Although, because of the confronting subject matter, I don’t think I'll be studying it any time soon in my Aus Lit class at Sydney Uni, there is something very moving about this book. It’s got a kind of compassionate glow that I think comes from the authors social realist take on a part of Sydney that’s usually somewhat romantically associated with drugs and criminals, where as this cuts through the mythology to show the harsh reality populated by very real people just trying to make it through their lives. Did I learn anything from this book? I leanrt a lot about the retial sex industry.
December 14, 2018
One of those novels that turn up in the bargain bin for $2, this looks funky in its retro cover and sounds like a good idea. Its title reminiscent of Jacqueline Susann’s 1969 bestseller, Love Machine (2010) is presumably an exercise in nostalgia for Caward, who knows his subject intimately. Though it’s doubtful the novel would have suffered if he’d left more of his research out, anyone familiar with the main setting – Kings Cross, Sydney’s red-light district – will find the extensive detail authentic.
Love Machine feels like a throwback to those quintessentially gen-X ’90s grunge novels (a standout being Luke Davies’ Candy), some of which it appears may have been formative for Caward, whose lack of any overt ambition to pitch beyond the local market (atypical of today’s emerging Oz authors) is curiously anachronistic. Sometimes, with its leisurely pace, Love Machine is also reminiscent of ‘lad lit’ by the likes of Brisbane’s Nick Earls, though Earls is funnier.
Still, Caward has a good ear for dialogue, a good eye for pathos, a sense of the absurd and a clean unfussy style, and this first novel feels like a labour of love. Predictably, perhaps, the only interesting female character – Antonella, a neurotic video-maker who’s older than Spencer, the thirtyish narrator – isn’t the principle love/lust interest. That role goes to Livia, the two-dimensional teenage whore with a heart of gold – a cliché used to far better effect in another debut novel: Nic Pizzolatto’s noir thriller published the same year, Galveston. Which reminds me: while Caward has mastered the craft of realistic depiction (more than can be said for some better-selling authors with stronger stories), he seems to lack something original or even worthwhile to say – which might matter less had Love Machine’s abundant description fleshed out a plot, or had its intermittent humour lived up to the blurb’s promise of comedy. But its reliance on gritty setting for substance may please readers who either find Spencer’s milieu a novelty or for whom it evokes sentimental memories.
Apparently, Oz actor and budding director David Wenham adapted a script from this unlikely novel. If funding hadn’t fallen through, Love Machine would have been his debut feature.
Love Machine feels like a throwback to those quintessentially gen-X ’90s grunge novels (a standout being Luke Davies’ Candy), some of which it appears may have been formative for Caward, whose lack of any overt ambition to pitch beyond the local market (atypical of today’s emerging Oz authors) is curiously anachronistic. Sometimes, with its leisurely pace, Love Machine is also reminiscent of ‘lad lit’ by the likes of Brisbane’s Nick Earls, though Earls is funnier.
Still, Caward has a good ear for dialogue, a good eye for pathos, a sense of the absurd and a clean unfussy style, and this first novel feels like a labour of love. Predictably, perhaps, the only interesting female character – Antonella, a neurotic video-maker who’s older than Spencer, the thirtyish narrator – isn’t the principle love/lust interest. That role goes to Livia, the two-dimensional teenage whore with a heart of gold – a cliché used to far better effect in another debut novel: Nic Pizzolatto’s noir thriller published the same year, Galveston. Which reminds me: while Caward has mastered the craft of realistic depiction (more than can be said for some better-selling authors with stronger stories), he seems to lack something original or even worthwhile to say – which might matter less had Love Machine’s abundant description fleshed out a plot, or had its intermittent humour lived up to the blurb’s promise of comedy. But its reliance on gritty setting for substance may please readers who either find Spencer’s milieu a novelty or for whom it evokes sentimental memories.
Apparently, Oz actor and budding director David Wenham adapted a script from this unlikely novel. If funding hadn’t fallen through, Love Machine would have been his debut feature.
June 19, 2021
This book is like an episode of the SBS show ‘Housos’ but not as good.
August 2, 2013
! I love coming across books like this one. Spencer was a really interesting character and The Cross was a fantastic location choice for this disturbing look at life from another angle!
May 25, 2025
The book left a greater imprint on me than expected. Like Garner’s Monkey Grip, it’s not trying to make a statement, but capture a time and place and feeling.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews