Tawdry, cheap and disingenuous: This taboo page-turner is toxic

American writer Jessica Knoll has earned a reputation as a canny and insightful creator of strong, capable female characters who are self-possessed and preternaturally in touch with their inner selves and most feverish desires.

Her 2015 debut, The Luckiest Girl in the World, was followed by The Favourite Sister in 2018, and 2023 brought her most accomplished work to date, the panoramic and deeply impressive Bright Young Women, which offered a fictionalised feminist perspective on the experiences of the female university students who were attacked by prolific serial killer Ted Bundy in their on-campus Florida sorority house in 1978.

Now comes Helpless, billed by its publishers as a “twisty and twisted erotic thriller”. Knoll’s story focuses on Faye Heron, a beautiful, successful, award-winning actress and producer who rose to fame on a Friends-like dramedy. She is unhappily married to a fellow writer-producer and in the throes of writing a new screenplay when she learns of the death of her former university film professor (and mentor) and returns to her alma mater for his funeral. While there, she is unexpectedly reunited with her first love, the darkly enigmatic Henry, who is now married to a former classmate, has two children and still lives near campus.

For Faye, returning to her former university is like opening a toxic time capsule – she finds herself surrounded by drunken fraternity brothers, friends she hasn’t meaningfully connected with in years and inescapable reminders of her intoxicating, highly sexualised relationship with her wealthy and controlling ex. Predictably, the two soon find their way back to one another and Knoll begins to explore themes of unconventional sexual desire, intimacy and exploitation, as well as coercive control in romantic relationships, using an ultimately highly implausible and ill-conceived kidnapping sub-plot as her primary narrative device.

Luckiest Girl Alive was a deeply personal book for Knoll. It focuses on a character who survives both a sexual assault and a school shooting, and the gang rape depicted in the novel was drawn from Knoll’s own deeply traumatic experience of being sexually assaulted by three boys at a high school party when she was 15. Bright Young Women explored the contemporary fascination with Bundy from the perspective of his victims, women whose faces and names are seldom acknowledged as more than footnotes. Female pain and suffering are intricately woven into each of Knoll’s books and, while all of her novels might be broadly categorised as thrillers, she generally explores both acute distress and the exploitation of women with deftness, discernment and understanding.

Helpless is no different to Knoll’s previous novels insofar as it traverses uncomfortable territory, though there is one noteworthy change. In Helpless – presumably conceived of as a fictionalised exploration of one woman’s unconventional and socially taboo kinks, rape and sexual degradation fantasies, as well as her experiences of coercive control and violence – the psychological and physical pain, as well as the sexual violation, experienced by Knoll’s protagonist feels utterly unconvincing.

More troubling, it feels one-dimensional, cheap and contrived as well as hollow and profoundly exploitative. The kidnapping storyline that she involves Faye in is equally ignominious, though I recognise the importance of the so-called “element of surprise” to the narrative enough not to reveal further details.

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, among others, has explored rape and degradation fantasies in her fiction, painstakingly elucidating the highly complex interplay between fear, power and gender dynamics through the lens of a female protagonist. In Helpless, unfortunately, Knoll tackles these important and controversial topics with no such subtlety or acuity. While it doubtless seeks to illuminate the darkest recesses of one woman’s inner fantasy life, in the end Helpless is a more tawdry, disingenuous and dehumanising romp than it is a provocative page-turner.

Helpless by Jessica Knoll is published by Simon and Schuster ($35).

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