I’m super torn about this one. A beautifully written book about an man who commits horrible, atrocious acts that are unredeemable from a moral standpoint. It’s difficult to even dissect without getting right into it, so let’s just do that.

First of all, again, the way this author writes is right up my alley. It was engaging, kept me coming back even when I wasn’t sure if I wanted too. The world he draws you into feels so palpable, especially considering the main sense this book tries to make you feel is scent. It was enthralling hearing the ways he would describe the world and activities the main character participated in. Most of the book is like this, and a good amount of the exposition doesn’t even really come off as horror, and more classical. I thought I’d be more upset by that considering I only started reading this for the horror aspect, but I actually ended up loving it for that.

The horror aspect of this comes from our main guy, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. What’s challenging here is that the book really does make you feel like Jean-Baptiste isn’t really a bad person. He was born into this world almost like a demon, and is treated like such by everyone he interacts with. The REAL challenge is that he doesn’t even really seem to care; he doesn’t really have any desires at all. Save the desire to smell and be engrossed in smells. As he develops in age, is where the story starts to take a dark turn. As an adolescent, he begins to become obsessed with smells, and even commits his first murder to try and capture the moment. He realizes he can’t, and begins his next quest to learn the ways of capturing scent.

Jean-Baptiste goes from living in a cave for 7 years, to being brought up in a quasi-healing scheme, all the way to retaining a position of journeyman perfumer. Death follows him wherever he goes, from people around him having the misfortune of dying early, or actually being murdered by Jean-Baptiste. My issue really comes into light as he starts to turn into an adult-his childish obsession with specifically virgins strikes a sour note. It’s hard to imagine our main character who grew up the way he did understanding the nuance of sexualizing a child. I’m not going to expect huge unexpected leaps of growth, but some of the language used doesn’t even come from Jean-Baptiste, but from the narrator. Some of the descriptions really rode on the line of comfortability. I guess you could argue that was part of the purpose of the novel, but there were many instances of shock and horror that didn’t necessarily need detailed descriptions of young women’s growing bodies. I can stand behind horror in most settings, but this one is hard to stand by.

The main reason I read this book in the first place is seeing it featured in an Instagram reel for books with a fucked up ending. I would definitely agree it belongs there, considering the end of this left me with more questions than answers. It had such a strong start, and at the pace it went it’s hard to imagine it ending any other way. Maybe I wanted to humanize Jean-Baptiste more, but it seems fruitless to empathize with a demon. The book stood at a 4/5, but for the subject matter getting too close to unwelcome territory I’ll bring it down to a 3/5.