by @drthoss, curator of HOWLS Book Club nominees for January 2024’s “My Body and Its Wants” category
I’m obsessed with how trapped I am in my body. My keeper. It determines what I can eat, drink—what I can even think—and it can feed me with ills that I, the mind, don’t even want. And the body is no god, either; the body is subject to outside forces, to poverty pressures, judgements, aggressions; all of which come to shape me, the unwilling participant in this game of forms. When it deprives me of pleasure, I go and seek it. Binge-eating. Drinks. Drugs. And yet it’s not even me who wants it. Who ever wanted it. I am not the body—and yet it is I who must suffer its pains.
Bad Brains by Kathe Koja
Still reeling from his divorce, would-be painter Austen takes a fall in a 7-Eleven parking lot that leaves him with brain damage and strange visions, a madness that sends him on a cross-country odyssey of debauchery and pain. (StoryGraph)
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Any fans of Koja’s other work will know what to expect with this. A poetic tour de force where every line reads with that potency of a puree. There’s an unrelenting immediacy to her stories, an entrapment inside the protagonist’s head that only the finest writers can ever pull off. Whenever we read another writer, we become them; their words erode our own sense of self. You’ll begin to feel just as Austen does through this text, as you fall deeper into this mirrored-void of what it truly means to be someone else.
StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore
1798, France. Nuns move along the dark corridors of a Versailles hospital where the young Sister Perpetué has been tasked with sitting with the patient who must always be watched. The man, gaunt, with his sallow skin and distended belly, is dying: they say he ate a golden fork, and that it’s killing him from the inside. But that’s not all—he is rumored to have done monstrous things in his attempts to sate an insatiable appetite…an appetite they say tortures him still.
Born in an impoverished village to a widowed young mother, Tarare was once overflowing with quiet affection: for the Baby Jesus and the many Saints, for his mother, for the plants and little creatures in the woods and fields around their house. He spends his days alone, observing the delicate charms of the countryside. But his world is not a gentle one—and soon, life as he knew it is violently upended. Tarare is pitched down a chaotic path through revolutionary France, left to the mercy of strangers, and increasingly, bottomlessly, ravenous. (StoryGraph)
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I was taken aback at Blakemore’s writing from the very first page. It was subdued, yet lyrical—and strangely kind. Strange in that I never knew prose could be kind. Art often is insidious; artists can take freely from their life, can eat their experiences—and therefore the experiences of others—so as to expel a product to be sold and admired. Blakemore’s Glutton doesn’t feel like this. It, like the best kind of art, reads more like a thematic exploration (and explanation) of how our wants are manufactured by the problems we’ve faced. The body can be hot-wired, remember, and there’s no better way of manipulating a body than through traumatising it, and Blakemore understands that better than most through her grim, quiet depiction of 18th century France.
Bookshop* | StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Choose us. Choose life.
Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting on a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth.
Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced.
Choose life. (StoryGraph)
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I make it no secret how indebted I am to my background. This is truly a special book that depicts the working-class horrors we face when a government absolutely hates your existence (and your very culture if you’re of Irish or Scottish descent). Welsh’s supposedly ‘vulgar language’ is no more vulgar than the Ekphrastic poems of old. If a poet evokes disgust and terror, it is not a failure of imagination, more a failure of self-censorship. There’s no better book to capture the banality of late capitalism and the self-destruction it breeds in its underlings. Trainspotting is pretty much a scream transcribed to words.
Bookshop* | StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
Junky by William S. Burroughs
Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first book, a candid, eyewitness account of times and places that are now long gone. This book brings them vividly to life again; it is an unvarnished field report from the American postwar underground. For this definitive 50th-anniversary edition, eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has painstakingly re-created the author’s original text, word by word, from archival typescripts. Here for the first time are Burroughs’s own unpublished Introduction and an entire omitted chapter, along with many “lost” passages and auxiliary texts by Allen Ginsberg and others. Harris’s comprehensive Introduction reveals the composition history of Junk‘s text and places its contents against a lively historical background. (StoryGraph)
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Burroughs’s depiction of not only queer identities, but an addicted and traumatised America, was wild for its time (1953). This novel was during a period of obscenity laws, where many of the acts that Burroughs captures were so far and above the law that it’s unreal how it was ever published. His work, unlike his peer Ginsberg, is far more thorough and matter-of-factly, a departure from say, the poetry of Koja, because to lean on lyricism and metaphor would be akin to hiding these apparent treasonous acts. He, like Welsh, understands that addiction is bred in these forgotten spaces, where the most lost and lonely of us crave something that makes us feel what humans ought to feel. He doesn’t want us to miss an inch.
Bookshop* | StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
Substance D — otherwise known as Death — is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain’s two hemispheres, leading first to disorentation and then to complete and irreversible brain damage. Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent, is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but to pass as an addict he must become a user, and soon, without knowing what is happening to him, he is as dependent as any of the addicts he is monitoring. (StoryGraph)
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This book really hit home for me. Phillip K Dick wrote this as he was withdrawing from MDMA (remember to read the memorandum at the end of the book), and a lot of that shows. He has his usual speculative weirdness mostly shaved away, and in its space we have the groundedness of day-in-day-out drug-taking. The speculative element is no longer some Black Mirror-esque invention. That’s not necessary: the mind, the meat its housed in, is already terrifyingly uncanny (atoms thinking about atoms?), especially with how easily a simple introduction of chemicals can utterly desecrate the perceptual faculties, the sense of self. Dick’s prose is short and to the point, letting, like Burroughs, the sheer gravity of a scene hit you, as Bob Arctor’s sense of self is slowly dismantled, as he becomes nothing more than a reflex machine. His work is no longer about investigating the drug—instead, his work is doing the drug, with grave, grave consequences.
Bookshop* | StoryGraph | Goodreads | Amazon
And The Winner Is…
Out of these five books, HOWLers voted to read Bad Brains by Kathe Koja. Discussion starts on January 1, and you can join in by joining the Discord!
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