Catherine Smith's first acclaimed collection The Butcher's Hands was a disturbing and exciting book. Lip moves on from its grotesqueries and grand guignol to a fierce, often frantic eroticism, seen, as in the earlier book, through the language of the human body; clothed, stripped, skinned, examined with forensic detail.

As in Heckmondwike, a litany of dangerous pleasure, in this book there are no safe words.