*Wide-Eyed Stare*
I had loaned this one out to The Ink-Stained Beard a while back, immediately having realized it would be right up his alley after skimming through the first few pages. The Beard has a rather disconcerting fascination with serial killers and the like. Anyway, afterwards, he gave it a short review wherein he stressed really quite alliteratively just how dark, debauched and depraved the book was. At the time I did not yet know just how much the man was fond of a good old understatement.
Because really, calling this book debauched and depraved does not do it an inch of justice.
I normally try to hide a lot of the story but I'm afraid I really gave up quite a bit on the plot here.
I'm going to leave it as is, because it's not a conventional novel, structure and plot-wise, and conventional cover blurb is almost impossible. Spoilers.
Convicted serial killer Andrew Compton wiles his days in solitary away by ruminating on pleasant memories. Dubbed the 'Eternal Host' by the sensationalist papers, after his tendency to eat the men he took home with him, and with his cannibalistic and necrophiliac proclivities known and feared by the world at large, it is unlikely that Andrew will ever see the light of day again. He has nothing to look forward to but an endless stagnation and a lonely death. But as he writes down his experiences, as he looks back on his joy, his exaltation in committing acts that society would condemn him for, Andrew comes to the realization that he would do anything to be out in the world again. And so, Andrew begins to plot his escape.
Half the world away, on the neon-soaked streets of New Orleans' French Quarter, the wealthy Jay has been hiding his dark cravings for flesh and blood by being quite selective in his male liaisons. Though the gay men in the neighbourhood know to be cautious, or that at least they feel that there's something 'off' about the muscular pretty boy and that they shouldn't stray too close, the frequent tourists, the intransigents and vagrants that wild New Orleans inevitably attracts have no such presentiments to save them, and so Jay is kept happy and content, knee deep in warm quivering flesh.
But recently a local Vietnamese teen has caught his eye, has thrilled his heart and loins and Jay is finding it quite hard to keep his distance.
Tran spends his days trying to forget the pain of a relationship turned hateful, selling drugs, and seeking comfort and solace on the neon-soaked streets of New Orleans, away from his traditional family home, but his ex-lover's voice hounds him from every radio, blaring in anger and hate, warning him of the doom that could befall any gay man, and he finds that solace and comfort are hard to find. But one of his clients could possibly provide a cure for the sickness in his heart, and as circumstance propels him out from under his parents' roof, Tran inevitably seeks his refuge with Jay, who himself has just met a dark and dangerous stranger recently arrived from the shores of the old world.
And on the radio, and in the throes of aids and the corrosive knowledge of impending death, Lush Rimbaud talks on and on about hate and despair. But is there still room for love in the dying man's heart, and is he still willing to become a part of humanity to save a doomed ex-lover?
I have never read any single book that gave such lovingly graphic descriptions of such a wild variety of upsetting things: Necrophilia, murder, torture, cannibalism, rape... sometimes even all of those at the same time. To put it simply; think of the most depraved shit a human being can do to another of its kind and it's likely in here.
I've said it before; the subject matter is one that is chosen by the author and if you can't stomach it then you better get off the bus. But this one is pretty extreme though.
This is alleviated, or rather this one has the impact of its shocks diminished, occluded, by the artistry of the author, and even the most ghoulish scenes have a sort of glamour surrounding them, as if its all unreal, or as if you can't really take it in.
I'm not sure that makes sense, even to myself, but the truth is that even though I can objectively see that the stuff in here was way more shocking than anything I read in Palahniuk's Haunted last month, it never actually felt that way.
It's a compelling little novel. Gore, horrible sex and violence, and it's... niiiiice?
It's a novel that only has gay characters, and said gay characters also have a lot of quite gay sex, frequently depicted graphically, so if you can't take that, best stay away. Since it was written in the nineties, its story has a marked focus on the whole Aids- scare. When the men in the novel have sex there's a heightened awareness of the possible consequences of that act, and a few of them, at the novel's beginning have already come face to face with their impending death from the disease, and the disease itself is almost another character in the story, its shadow almost always present.
That all being said. I did quite like this one. Don't know anyone I could recommend it to myself. But, if you're still reading, then maybe you would like to give it a go? I guarantee you'll be horrified.
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MASSIVE SPOILERS
So then, on my overly expansive blurb: The title, Exquisite Corpse, might come from the artistic idea of crafting a story from one point to the next, not being aware of the end result at the novel's outset.
This is probably why, even though we start the book with Andrew Compton, his incarceration and subsequent escape from prison, quite soon the story is taken over by Tran, Jay and Luke, their relationships and the inevitable direction that will take.
Upon reflection, this really seems undeniable, as it seems clear to me that regardless of how the novel ends, Andrew Compton didn't actually have much of an influence on its ending. He's someone that just coasts into town, sees the sights, and then leaves again for greener pastures.
It's why devising a blurb was such a hard thing to do, and why I was so unimpressed by virtually all of the book's previous blurbs; they mostly all focus on Andrew Compton, despite him having no real bearing on the plot.
Take him out and you can't quite prove that for our three principal characters, things wouldn't have ended up the same way. There's a strange horrendous beauty to that ending too, that haunting finale.
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