elizabetta

This is nightmarish horror, lurid and grisly. As the author says...who amongst us doesn’t crane to look at an accident on the side of the rode, to see how bad the damage is? And so it is possible to get sucked into the morass. In ‘Exquisite Corpse’ bodily fluids flow freely and the time setting, the early days of the AIDS epidemic, is integral to the general feel of hopelessness.

As with Kyle Sullivan’s [b:How to Rape a Straight Guy|2611713|How to Rape a Straight Guy|Kyle Michel Sullivan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348335875s/2611713.jpg|2636361] we are invited into the world of the psychopath, people as connected to mayhem as to breathing. But, unlike that book we don’t really get to see much beneath the madness -- to the from-where or for-why these murderers do what they do best -- they simply flail about wreaking havoc. Written in sections of alternating points of view with no delineation between them, we meet Andrew and Jay whose common thread is their obsession with corpses and young boys and combining the two. Loneliness is their demon -- their deep dread of it and the lengths they will go to ward it off.

The one glimmer of light, Tran, is the beautiful young boy who acts as lure for their morbid lust. Abandoned by his family and looking for love in all the wrong places, he was the only character I felt any connection to. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough. The writing is quite good, the story is ghastly, this is definitely not for the feint of heart.