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jsjammersmith's review
5.0
There's something about a man who uses an army of aborted fetuses to wreak havoc upon humanity, and also to paralyze a girl scout who made him but cookies he didn't want. I suppose there's also something to a book where the Toothy Fairy destroys a marriage by disjoining a woman's head from her shoulder's thus allowing her husband to run off with her younger self's body, and then don't even get me started on the guys dressed up as mattresses.
Douglas Paszkiewicz is an author with no shame, and this lack of human decency allows for an incredible capacity for art. Any Arsenic Lullaby book is bound to shock the reader at least once, and even a hardened cynic like me had to stop reading now and then to simply shake my head and try to stop laughing. These stories are wretched to their core, and riddled with a manner of depravity that at first appears to be nothing but empty shock value.
But I do believe that there is an artistic merit here because while most of the comedy is rooted in some shock value, there is an attempt to use the grotesque as it's own aesthetic. Paszkiewicz's characters are depraved or damaged or evil, but they never lose their humanity. Every story in this book is checked by a real concern for capturing the way human beings honestly behave and so while reading this book I never felt as if I was reading a list of shocking statements or ideas, I was instead reading the stories of severely flawed human beings, and so their pains or joys (often at other people's expense) were all the more hilarious.
It's a shame that few people have read Paszkiewicz's work, and that I had to post this book on Goodreads just so I could review it, but hopefully someone will find this book, and share the joy of watching zealous Census takers murder babies to ensure that the Census stays accurate. It's awful, and terrible, and will surely revolt the most virtuous of souls, but at least there's feeling of self-loathing as you find yourself putting the book down so you can stop laughing for just a few more minutes.
Douglas Paszkiewicz is an author with no shame, and this lack of human decency allows for an incredible capacity for art. Any Arsenic Lullaby book is bound to shock the reader at least once, and even a hardened cynic like me had to stop reading now and then to simply shake my head and try to stop laughing. These stories are wretched to their core, and riddled with a manner of depravity that at first appears to be nothing but empty shock value.
But I do believe that there is an artistic merit here because while most of the comedy is rooted in some shock value, there is an attempt to use the grotesque as it's own aesthetic. Paszkiewicz's characters are depraved or damaged or evil, but they never lose their humanity. Every story in this book is checked by a real concern for capturing the way human beings honestly behave and so while reading this book I never felt as if I was reading a list of shocking statements or ideas, I was instead reading the stories of severely flawed human beings, and so their pains or joys (often at other people's expense) were all the more hilarious.
It's a shame that few people have read Paszkiewicz's work, and that I had to post this book on Goodreads just so I could review it, but hopefully someone will find this book, and share the joy of watching zealous Census takers murder babies to ensure that the Census stays accurate. It's awful, and terrible, and will surely revolt the most virtuous of souls, but at least there's feeling of self-loathing as you find yourself putting the book down so you can stop laughing for just a few more minutes.
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