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Reviewed by Lex Allen for Readers' Favorite
Hysterical by Amber Dean is the first-person narrative of Jessie Anne, a sexually addicted bisexual woman suffering from dissociative identity disorder (DID). On the one side, she's in love with her best friend, Tinsel, who doesn't want to commit to a one-person affair. On the other side, Jessie suffers from an alter ego that fantasizes about horrific, violent murder and cannibalism. Meeting sex partners online helps to relieve her from constantly thinking of Tinsel until she meets a wealthy man who treats her like his queen. Though she'd love to be his queen, her inner demon has other plans. Following her first impulse to murder, her alternate personality takes over, and it's "Katy bar the door" to an unexpectedly horrific conclusion.
Among my favorite horror story writers, Richard Laymon was known for exceptionally horrific characters and explicitly described bloodbaths. His popularity among American horror fans waned, while his British fans and I couldn't get enough of him and his characters. For me, Amber Dean is as close to Laymon as I've had the pleasure of discovering. While most horror writers shy away from explicit narratives of bloody murder and/or explicit sex scenes that include bisexual, light BDSM, as well as drug-induced "chemsex" scenes and subsequent cannibalism, Amber Dean jumps right into it; all of it. The story highlights and tracks the shift from a normal (albeit a sex and drug addicted) woman to a lonely soul who's just looking for lasting love, even if she must share that love between "Mr. Wall Street" and Tinsel. Dean excels in writing a story that shocks, in effect, while highlighting the truth and facts of "on the fringe" realities and personal struggles; or as Stephen King puts it, "Fiction is a lie, good fiction is the truth within the lie."
