Scan barcode
A review by whogivesabook
White Trash Gothic by Edward Lee
5.0
I didn't have a clue about this one. I searched for audiobooks with a run time of 8 hours. I needed that length because I had a stocktake at work and when you account for increasing playback speed it would sit snug within that shift. It was billed as extreme horror. I liked the cover art.
Wow. I was not at all prepared.
Only last week I was complaining to my boss at work that there wasn't enough extremely disturbing writing going on... How wrong I was!
I think, when you work in a bookshop, you can easily get wrapped up in the publishing industry as a sanitised vehicle for celebrity memoir, fiction about thin white girls with either a) an older lover interest b) a crippling ennui and an age appropriate boyfriend c) fairy powers and sword skills... and the obligatory Booker nominated work about racism and/or a developing country, naturally.
I'm being reductionist, but it is pretty standard. Now and then you get something written extremely well, but it's usually by a writer with a career spanning into the decades.
Enter the indie publishing world... The wild west of publishing. Where men still roam the halls and huff paint thinner while desperately tugging their ego towards an inky climax...
There's no possible chance works like this could find a wide public fanbase... (although, I know they would and should!)... But my god, I've not read a book as funny and self-aware and yet gross and disturbing in a long time!
It follows a writer with amnesia trying to trace his own past... To find a road towards knowing himself... And while on that road, in the deep south, he encounters a solid but insane bunch of reprobates.
Don't even look at this book unless you love horror and have a strong disposition!
Wow. I was not at all prepared.
Only last week I was complaining to my boss at work that there wasn't enough extremely disturbing writing going on... How wrong I was!
I think, when you work in a bookshop, you can easily get wrapped up in the publishing industry as a sanitised vehicle for celebrity memoir, fiction about thin white girls with either a) an older lover interest b) a crippling ennui and an age appropriate boyfriend c) fairy powers and sword skills... and the obligatory Booker nominated work about racism and/or a developing country, naturally.
I'm being reductionist, but it is pretty standard. Now and then you get something written extremely well, but it's usually by a writer with a career spanning into the decades.
Enter the indie publishing world... The wild west of publishing. Where men still roam the halls and huff paint thinner while desperately tugging their ego towards an inky climax...
There's no possible chance works like this could find a wide public fanbase... (although, I know they would and should!)... But my god, I've not read a book as funny and self-aware and yet gross and disturbing in a long time!
It follows a writer with amnesia trying to trace his own past... To find a road towards knowing himself... And while on that road, in the deep south, he encounters a solid but insane bunch of reprobates.
Don't even look at this book unless you love horror and have a strong disposition!