I had no problem with the original Fifty Shades of Grey. I thought it was funny and perky, and I liked the fact that a woman got to write it on her kitchen table, rather than the other, less relaxing ways people make money in erotica.

In some ways, Grey, the follow-up to EL James’s bestseller, is almost the same book. It is as if every line of dialogue, every legal contract that sets out Christian Grey’s sub-dom relationship with Anastasia Steele, every email from the first volume has been cut and pasted in. We follow each scene in the same order, except this time we see it from Christian’s point of view.

This completely flips the narrative. The first book was a rather fun and fairly mild portrait of a woman’s sexual fantasy. Yet 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. Whenever Ana leaves the room, even just for two minutes, Christian assumes she’s making out with another man. He wonders if she likes her men the way she likes her tea: black and weak. Anastasia is, he says, “one of the few women I’ve met who can sit in silence, which is great”. And where Anastasia famously bites her lip every two lines to signal arousal, Christian continually “shifts in his seat”. It’s not easy to make men’s bits sound sexy, but this phrase makes it sound as if he has worms.

One of the first things Christian does after he meets Anastasia – having slobbered all over her in the interview scene – is order a background check to find out everything about her. When she won’t tell him where she is going, he immediately accesses the darknet to pinpoint her location and goes to find her (she loves this). It’s the same story when she doesn’t answer an email right away, or dares to visit her mother. When he buys her lots of things and she tells him it makes her feel like a whore, he threatens to send her to his therapist to address her self-esteem issues. Never has the meme #notallmen been more relevant.

Oh, and all Christian thinks about is sex and food. It’s a bit like peering into the inside of your dog’s head – if your dog spent 80% of his day pouring out glasses of chilled Sancerre. (Dear Mr Grey: if you are truly so desperate for your girlfriend to eat properly, maybe don’t date a woman who wears a size four?)

The first trilogy was a fantasy. This book is far more realistic – and creepy beyond belief. I would never censor anything my daughter might want to read when she is older. But if she wants to read Grey, I’d make sure she knows that if anyone ever treats her like this, she should run like the wind. Because there is a flipside to the fantasy portrayed in these pages: we know there are men who think this way. Men who do want to write, like Christian Grey: “I won’t hit you again” on the consolatory flowers they send the day after an attack. Men who don’t have the looks and the helicopters that apparently make it OK. There is no happy ending to this story – unless there is a tremendous twist coming further down the line, and these are Grey’s prison diaries. Which would, as Anastasia might put it, just about appease my inner goddess.