Dakota Fanning and Jamie Dornan in the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Critics have panned EL James’s follow-up to the Fifty Shades trilogy as pretty much “Mr Darcy with nipple clamps”.

The Telegraph even went so far as to say that the book, which retells the saucy story from Christian Grey’s perspective, is “about as sexy as a misery memoir and as arousing as the diary of a sex offender”.

Sound enticing? If you’re still tempted to find out for yourself what Christian Grey was thinking all along, we’ve rounded up the best reviews doing the rounds on Grey to help you decide.

Here’s what the early critics have to say:

• “Here, the flesh strung between the narrative bones reveals Mr Grey to be an even more deeply unpleasant, insecure asshole than your correspondent had previously imagined. And no more three-dimensional.” — The Economist

• “It is almost impossible to read Grey and not assume the narrator is going to end up in jail. It is most reminiscent of those thrillers that open from the point of view of the heavy breathing murderer stalking his prey. Instead of lighthearted and repetitive mild S&M, the ‘love affair’ is now the twisted work of an utter psychopath.” — The Guardian

• “Grey’s self-loathing comes alive in predictable expletives — and predictable cliches as realises his pull to Ana is ‘like a moth to a flame’.” — St Louis Post-Dispatch

• “It is a behemoth of a book, 557 pages of Ana and Christian’s fraught and at times unsettling love story, here made more unsettling by the truth that fans already know: Christian is not just dark and mysterious; he’s everything he warned Ana he was in the original book. He’s unquestionably ‘fifty shades of [expletive] up’.” — The Washington Post

• “This time, we see it not as Ana sees it but as that prize dick Christian Grey sees it. On the plus side, this means that we do not get to hear any more that her ‘inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves’ and so forth …” — The Evening Standard

For everyone roasting James’s latest work, however, nice to see that someone was a fan.

No doubt E.L. James’s new book Grey will be a bestseller.Source:AP