A review by chillcox15
Cannibals in Love by Mike Roberts

5.0

Although Mike Roberts is writing about being a twentysomething (read: hipster) (read: millennial hipster) in a time period (2001-2010 or thereabouts) that I'm a tad too young to connect with directly, there's something so immediate in the depleted, ethereal emotions of Cannibals in Love. I fell for it immediately, falling for both the milieu of its characters (the bands forged in these pages sound awfully familiar) and for the stack of polaroids-cum-mixtape that the narrator-author describes the book's structure as. The emotional register is masterfully reflected in that structure of seemingly disparate narrative bubbles; it takes the first three or four to recognize that we are getting one cohesive narrator as a throughline (I thought that the tag of "A Novel" may have been a red herring) but it all comes together a third of the way through, only for it to slip apart again at the end. It's hard to grasp at, like being in love.