By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
This review is also on Reedsy Discovery.
Spoilers: Since this review is for the second volume in a trilogy, I advise you to read my review for the first volume, Gutted and be forewarned that this review will contain MAJOR SPOILERS!!
In Gutted, the first volume of Anna Madorsky’s Gutted, Dissolved, and Then Finished Trilogy, Elliot, a woman troubled by PTSD and frequent insomnia, meets Jason, a highly intelligent, temperamental stranger who shares many of her philosophical Nihilistic thoughts. The two become lovers and kindred spirits before Jason reveals that in moments of fury, he killed people in the past and still has the urge to kill again. Elliot is at first frightened but then is drawn to his aggressive energy and open contempt for people around them. They marry and she becomes complicit and eventually partners with him when he goes in for his latest kill: a man who brutally kidnapped, raped, and murdered her friend Abbie. Elliot helps Jason cover up the crime but their relationship has been significantly altered so she decides to take a break from their marriage. She won’t notify anyone but she can’t be with Jason right now. She leaves him to find a different life for herself.
Dissolved, the second volume is mostly about her time alone. If Gutted was a journey of Elliot discovering the dark side within herself and Jason and taking those dark sides to frightening levels, then Dissolved is about the opposite. It involves Elliot trying desperately to return to normalcy or perhaps embracing it for the first time.
To maintain distance between herself and Jason, Elliot offers to house-sit for Oluchi, friend of a friend in Portland. In this new location, she makes new friends and becomes a different person. Unfortunately, she can’t stay away from Jason for too long and the two reunite. Their reunion brings back their actions and unresolved conflicts and Elliot has to either leave Jason to his own devices or return to their “Bonnie-and-Clyde” escapades.
In the previous book, Elliot lived in a cloak of darkness. She was still scarred with the traumas of her past and her mind was fogged from sleepless nights and damaging memories. She became easily susceptible to Jason’s manipulations, intellectual rhetoric, and pressing dark souled charisma.
She thought that she found someone who shared her pessimistic views of the world until he revealed that he had been purposely stalking her. What he needed was a partner to share and facilitate these dark urges to commit murder. She was an outsider to everyone but to Jason and began to embrace a complete isolation from the world and a detachment to its laws and standards.
Dissolved is about the same woman trying her damned best to join that world that she once felt isolated from. Elliot invigorates her friendships by becoming more involved in their issues. In the previous book, she displayed some empathy for a coworker having trouble with her aging mother, and a couple of friends that are having marital problems. Most prominently, her concern for Abbie is what motivates her and Jason's rage and desire for murder. But her interactions with them conveyed world weary detachment as though she viewed them through thick glass, observing and feeling but up to a point.
However, she blossoms in Portland. She bonds with Oluchi enough to give her some information about her marriage (though not all of it). An elderly neighbor, Josephine treats her like a surrogate daughter. Rav and Yesenia, a fighting married couple, are put into her confidence.
Rav and Yesenia’s subplot proves an interesting contrast to Elliot and Jason. Rav and Yesenia's fights are loud, emotional, and almost darkly comic like a realistic sitcom with a hard edge. In other words, they are the type of couple that Elliot and Jason tried to avoid becoming. Rav and Yesenia's marriage conflicts are all outward while Elliot's and Jason's are inward.
Also Rav proves to be a contrast to Elliot herself especially when Jason returns. Just as Elliot sees Jason as a means to share her trauma and her grief, Rav sees them as a means to reflect his own aggressions and irritations. He is drawn to their shadow presence as much as Elliot had been to Jason. Looking at it now from the outside, she recognizes the harm and toxicity to the relationship but also is aware of her own longing for Jason's presence once more even as she tries to reject him.
Elliot also has a potential second love interest in Caspian, a bookseller. It isn't quite a romance but it is a deep respectful friendship. Caspian is an alternative to Jason. Like Jason he is highly intelligent, speaks of philosophical, metaphysical, and literary concepts, and causes Elliot to look inward. However he does so in a more positive way that seeks to better her not pull her down to a lower level as Jason does.
Normally, I don't care for love triangles but this is one that actually kind of works because of what Jason and Caspian represent to Elliot. Jason opened up her outsider status and encouraged her to acknowledge her darker angrier side, the side that had been hurt, hates the world, and wants to pass that hurt along to someone else.
Caspian wants to encourage Elliot's softer, more empathetic side, the type that wants to be loved and surrounded by loving, understanding people. Elliot opens up to share her thoughts about poetry, literature, and finding creative means to express her emotions. Caspian gives her possibilities to see past that hurt and find a way to move on from it. He opens up the insider status and the desire to belong and be accepted
Another way that Elliot expresses the desire to belong is through her family. In the previous book, Elliot was abused by or estranged from her immediate family. She was left isolated without anyone close to her, no positive examples to learn from leaving her alone and vulnerable.
Now she learns that her father died and she makes an attempt to reconcile with her mother who lives in Australia with her younger brothers. Elliot recognizes her own wasted effort at a reunion when the woman turns her back on her daughter while justifying choosing her sons over her.
Instead Elliot actually does discover a found family in her Aunt Ava, her father's sister. She runs a New Age shop, reads Tarot Cards, and gives Elliot maternal advice about love and relationships. She is the older feminine guide that Elliot needed all along. It's particularly intriguing that she finds this familial link while separated from Jason. Without Jason her circle has widened but with him, it was severely limited.
You will notice in my review that I don't refer to Elliot and Jason's romance much but refer to other characters. That's because Jason isn't in it as much as the others. In his frequent absence from the narrative, other characters take prominent roles in Elliot’s life. She seems to be doing alright without him. For a time.
When Jason returns, Elliot realizes how much she missed that intense passion between them and their unique relationship in a world of two. She also is more suspicious of him and receives non-answers when she asks if he killed anyone else since they have been apart. She wonders if her presence was able to satisfy his bloodlust or at least redirect it to people who they felt deserved to die like abusers and rapists.
She is torn between the man that proved to be a dangerous killer and the man that she feels understands her the most. Even though she worked very hard at improving herself since their separation, she still has traces of that sad, mentally scarred, traumatized young woman that Jason met. The more she tries to deny their connection, the harder that it is to resist him.
Gutted revealed that Elliot was figuratively cut open when Jason explored her vulnerabilities. Dissolved reveals the tug of war between Elliot's personas: law or lawlessness, inner peace or outward violence, belonging or isolation, love or loneliness, society or outsider, burying her painful past or letting it consume her, being a decent person helping others or a violent criminal creating someone else's pain. Eventually, one or the other persona is going to have to dissolve, leaving only one.
