Last week I read the first book in this series, Moths, and gave it a glowing review. On the one hand, I think Toxxic pairs well with Moths in many ways. But I PROFOUNDLY did not enjoy reading it.
Moths told us the story of a world where, 50 years before, a toxin that only effected men had spread like wildfire. The toxin either killed the men outright, or else drove them permanently into violent psychosis. Nearly all men died, either from violence or being unable/uninterested in caring for themselves. Only a few were able to be kept alive, constantly sedated. New generations of men were kept carefully cloistered in clean facilities, and society as a whole developed into a women-only one.
In Toxxic, following the development of a vaccine, society is looking at the re-integration of men. Yet there is opposition. Many of the older women, who lived through the incredible violence of the initial plague, remember men as sources of fear and terror. And they remember the world before, male-dominated and patriarchal, when it was frightening to go walking alone at night, you had to keep a careful eye on your drink at a bar, and male-superiority was baked into nearly everything to one degree or another. Even if the vaccine works, and we don’t have to fear men becoming violent psychopaths, they ask, do we really want to go back to that?
This is where I will address the ways that Moths and Toxxic play against each other. The protagonist of Moths was one of the women who survived the initial outbreak, and did so with her sense of empathy intact. Her life’s vocation was as a carer in one of the clean facilities. Her husband died in the initial infection; her son became violent, and attacked her, but was taken safely into custody. Crucially, despite her son’s assault, she was spared the worst of the violence.
One of the primary POVs in Toxxic did not. She survived as a teenager, and was witness to some of the most horrifying of the violence that happened. Unsurprisingly it left her deeply, deeply traumatized, and when it is announced that men are going to be reintroduced into society, she joins a movement to prevent this by any means necessary.
So this book was hard to read. The depictions of violence, which includes sexual violence, are unflinching. The first book was bad enough; this one was worse. While I understand why the author chose to do it the way she did, it nevertheless felt gratuitous to me. As an artistic choice, fine. But I don’t particularly want to read it.
And there was one change that was subtle, but once I realized it I was profoundly bothered by it. In the first book, the toxin-induced psychosis seemed like just that: psychosis. The men went mad and became violent. In this book, they didn’t seem to go mad so much as go sadistic. It seemed to really almost cheapen the story, and is a large part of the reason I say it felt gratuitous.
So to sum up: I enjoyed the first book, and thought it was excellent. I did not enjoy the second book, and am undecided on whether it was excellent or not. This might be one of those books I think about for a long time, but I really, really hope not.
Trigger warnings on this book: Sexual assault (both violent and coerced); grooming; graphic violence; suicide.
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