Limbs - What You're Missing
I was able to get Tim Meyer to send me a signed copy of this fun book with its doll-parts cover, and the story is as fun as the cover art.
The story follows Ray, our narrator and main character, who is somewhere between a protagonist and antagonist. He has acrotomophilia, which is kindly defined at the start of the book as when one derives sexual pleasure from fantasies or acts involving an amputee. Ray's perspective is both shaming this condition and understanding and validating it, which is pretty unique and very humanizing. Ray's main source of finding these type of relationships for sexual escapades is from meetings tailored to amputees, and well, Ray is not an amputee himself, so that presents an issue. Ray's hobby is a bit like Fight Club in that he must pretend to suffer to fit in at the meetings and gain the trust of amputees to get them to go to bed with him.
However, poor Ray suffers from so much guilt about his methods of achieving the gratification for which his mind and body lusts. He's certain that he cannot get sexual pleasure from anyone other than an amputee, yet he meets someone (with all limbs intact) who makes him feel a love he never felt before. In the background, the town he lives in happens to be at the mercy of a serial amputator. Someone is running around, abducting people to simply remove a limb or two before setting them free to roam the world forever changed. Ray's thoughts turn to murkier places as he navigates his new relationship and ponders the identity and motives of the serial amputator.
Dark, humorous, and ever-entertaining, this book will give you pause about the inner workings of people and what drives them.
