Review of ‘Brutal’ by Uday Satpathy: India’s first crowd-curated book

Reviewed by Minakhi Misra

A college student axes three of his friends during a jungle party and goes missing afterwards. A schoolteacher locks a classroom full of students and murders eleven of them in cold blood, only to have his own head blown off by a sniper. The leader of the militant outfit that claims responsibility for the sniping operation dies the next day in his own building.

These deaths make up just the twenty opening pages of India’s first crowd-sourced and crowd-curated novel. Debutant author Uday Satpathy’s Brutal is the first book to shine out of Rashmi Bansal’s trailblazing publishing venture Bloody Good Book, and it is quite literally “bloody” and “good” to its core.