Book Review: The End of Alice
December 22, 2025
Three-hundred and sixty two days ago, I purchased a strange assortment of novels from a second-hand bookshop in New York City. Among them was The End of Alice, a Granta publication by A.M. Holmes that, if I’m being honest, I purchased primarily for shock value. I’ll insert the blurb below for reference; not much explanation is necessary to express what about it was uniquely offensive.
A child-killer writes to a nineteen-year-old woman. He is serving his twenty-third year in prison. She, under the guise of a seemingly sweet and bland persona, is intent on seducing a young neighborhood boy.
As I approached the bookstore cashier that day, I held both Alice as well as Nabokov’s Lolita within the small stack of books I intended to buy. In hindsight, they must have thought me to be a very odd individual indeed. But I wouldn't want to accidentally give you a similar impression of myself now, so please allow me to present a brief defense of these purchases as to reassure you of my intentions. The appeal of these stories lay not in some unseen, perverted desires of mine, but rather a sort of grotesque fascination; I could not even begin to fathom what might possibly compel someone to author a work containing such repulsive subject matter. I intended to read both books, but failed to make it very far into either before being overwhelmed by disgust. Shortly after these attempts, I stashed both novels deep within my bookshelf and left them to accumulate dust for a year.
On December 20th, my mom and I departed for Taiwan. I carried two books—The End of Alice & Murakami’s After Dark—in my backpack as insurance in case I got bored sometime during the trip. Today (the 22nd) was a rather gloomy day, the kind you spend mainly indoors, which presented me with an opportunity to give the first novel a second chance.
I started from the very beginning and read through all two-hundred and fifty pages in just a few hours. I finished it about ten minutes ago, and I’ve spent the time since then writing the above paragraphs.
Despite only having read just a few chapters of Lolita in the past, it was easy for me to identify the obvious influence of Nabokov’s work on Holmes’s piece. Both works present haunting tales of sexual exploitation from the perspective of the perpetrator and feature a markedly pretentious narrator. It would probably be easier to differentiate them rather than describe their similarities, so I will do so below. In my opinion, these were the qualities most unique to Alice:
a) the nonlinear nature of its storyline
b) the incorporation of a SECOND pedophilic character operating in cahoots with the original offender (and a female at that, reflecting a trope rarely seen in mainstream media), and
c) the complex history of the primary narrator (which was developed in far more detail in Alice than I saw done with Humbert Humbert in Lolita).
Holmes’s writing was addictive and entirely sickening. Each page I consumed was a piece of poison apple, each noxious sentence coated in an intoxicating layer of beautiful prose. The story escalated rather rapidly as I creeped towards the endsheet, and the finale left me feeling physically affected. It was truly a nausea-inducing read.
I often opt to read rather peculiar novels, particularly those that evoke within me some sort of visceral reaction. This book more than accomplished that—upon turning the last page, I was rendered horrified and emotionally ravaged in a manner unlike anything I’ve ever felt prior, rivaling only perhaps my experience reading V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic.
Would I recommend Alice? Probably not. The novel involves such taboo topics that I assume most people would have a difficult time getting through it. It was not what I would call an "enjoyable" read, but it was very impactful nonetheless.