Venomous (review)

After biting off a piece of a classmate’s nose at eight, Locke (and those around him) realized that the anger inside him was abnormally powerful. Since then, Locke has struggled to keep the “venom” inside him where it can’t harm others, though the efforts at ignoring it into submission generally just result in even more startling and dramatic outbursts. After Locke meets Goth girl Renée, however, he has even more motivation to change, as he realizes that even though the counterculture group of which she is part may accept him flawed and out of control, she is too damaged and vulnerable herself to accommodate any of his violence. Interspersed throughout the novel are comic-book-style snippets starring Locke’s alter ego, an antihero who fights crime but who also discovers a horrifying secret about the source from which he draws power and righteous anger. The internal battle of the fantasy protagonist parallel, writ large in exaggerated comic book descriptions, effectively emphasizes both how helpless Locke feels at the hands of his own rage and how unwilling he is at first to truly take responsibility for finding ways to quell it permanently (if it is a separate force inside him, then it isn’t really his true self). Dramatic black-and-white illustrations are peppered throughout, highlighting the solitude and darkness that Locke feels is both within him and in most of the world around him. Krovatin tempers the genuinely disturbing degree to which his character is driven by aggression by carefully developing him as a hopeless romantic who is fiercely loyal to his family and deeply troubled by his own weaknesses. Although few readers will struggle to the same extent with anger, most will recognize the feeling of futility that can accompany efforts to truly change an integral part of themselves.