Bath Haus is a book I've eagerly anticipated for a while now since the publisher was kind enough to approve me for a digital advance copy. Many bookish friends and trusted internet reviewers gave it good praise, and I have been excited about the recent boom of mainstreamed Queer genre fiction.

With that excitement in mind, I'm sure some diminished returns were in order; however, this one struck me as extremely ridiculous from the jump. 

I get that a little situational hyperbole is to be expected in the thriller genre, and I am not an anti-thriller reader who jumped into the genre just to read a Queer work, but the premise here is extremely wacky to me. Allowing yourself to be stalked and blackmailed over attempted infidelity that led to actual assault seems way too far-fetched to me. If the affair had been consummated before the assault or without the assault, I'd have a greater acceptance for the premise, but the lack of consummation runs this one off the rails for me as a reader. I think the plot would have been better served by leaning into whatever shady gaslighting and power hunger was happening with Nathan.

I will also say that I found this one overly pandering to straight audiences. While I understand that choice in a straight-authored work like Razorblade Tears (a thriller with gay themes that I really enjoyed), seeing it in a Queer-authored work was disappointing. I would hope that a Queer author would be more willing to write for their people and leave straight readers to figure it out. Alas, it feels like there was some caving to publisher demands for accessibility.