Jillian Luft’s Scumbag Summer is a Dark Feminine Erotic Black Comedy Trip

About Scumbag Summer

Writer: Jillian Luft

Genre: Comedy/Erotica/Dark

Publisher: House of Vlad Press

Scumbag Summer Review:

I remember coming across an author by the name of Elle Nash in a podcast which gave ample airtime for Elle to highlight her then upcoming novel, “Deliver Me,” and being absolutely enamoured with everything she had to say. This eventually led to Elle being on my podcast when I was halfway into “Deliver Me.” So when the ‘Chelsea Wolfe’ of dark feminine fiction recommends a book on social media you fucking listen.

Jillian Luft’s “Scumbag Summer” is that very such book. A book, in which the synopsis is very much baked in a sequence of events from the perspective of the other woman in a relationship with a married man, over the course of a summer. But with the added flavours of endless pop culture references, comedic descriptors, erotic interludes, and wading through a volume of its own self deprecation.

The writing thoughtfully unravels a story, based on Luft’s experiences, which is a millennial’s wet dream. It’s a willfully technicolor swansong which throws back to the intersection of the many genres which plagued the early 2000s. A time when grunge was well and truly over, nu-metal was on life support and the beginning of the brave new world of the internet was on the cusp of the mainstream as it threatened the very innocence of adults trying to find themselves. And in many ways it’s that trying to find one’s self which personifies the character of this book with its highs and depressive lows.

Going back to the “other woman” I mentioned earlier, she narrates her ordeal in dealing with the worst kind of scumbag and acts as an audience surrogate to her thoughts, feelings, anxieties and inner turmoil. Like you’ve stumbled across the debaucherous drunken drug-fuelled diary ramblings of a woman stuck in her own head while the tragedies of her own family motivate her poor decisions.

This is a dark feminine erotic black comedy that trips and trods over a minefield of mishaps and woeful bad decisions adding to the overall humility of a life spinning out of control. It’s in this downward spiral of a novel where this reviewer will go “oh yeah I get it. Men really are fucked.” Says this man signing off. And that’s why Jillian Luft’s “Scumbag Summer” is My Kind of Weird.