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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hatred is purer than "self", September 16, 2005
This review is from: The Consumer (Paperback)
Some reviewers automatically equate an empathy for or perception of things hateful/evil with SELF-hatred: "Oh, he must hate himself." This may be true in some people, and has by his own admission been true at times in M. Gira's life. But let's not be "therapeutically correct" here, okay? This is a kind of art I've yet to read anywhere else, and as a lover of horror since a young kid I'm "eating it up." But slowly -- you really can only take so much at a time. It's that good. As with Swans, he goes where no one else has gone, to my knowledge, and with this kind of impact. Only about 10% of the time are these pieces a bit "wordy," as one person said below. Get with it: It's his first book, it doesn't hinder, and he's just letting out all the stops. Look at Lovecraft!! This book to me is almost as, well, genius as the works of Thomas Ligotti, who does more philosophical-type horror. Nothing too thinky here; Gira goes for the real-life slice of horror that might be interesting to actually "see" when we come upon it. And the images! I'll close with this, from the second or third story: You know how an animal can appear to be smiling sometimes (hey, maybe they are)? Well, there's this drugged-out teen in the scruffy area around a drainage pipe he's just come out of, and he watches a dog tumble down the hillock from the freeway, where it most likely has just been hit by a car. Its leg is severed completely off, a gaping red wound, and when the dog comes to a stop its first action is to look up askance at the boy with its tongue panting out to the ground and a smile on its face. Very creepy. Many times what the author goes for in these tales is a kind of ecstasy in pain. Transcendence of ego, all that... I've never read anything like this; can't believe he did Swans and also this. Someone rerelease this book!
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Giras troubled mind leaks onto paper..., November 10, 2003
This review is from: The Consumer (Paperback)
This disturbing collections of short stories, musings, and seemingly random thoughts actually hovers somewhere between 3 and 4 stars, but I give Mr. Gira the benefit of the doubt. The purity of the ugliness written almost poetically on these pages becomes almost beautiful in its sick, twisted, dark, painful, pain-filled, drug-induced dislocation of mind and self. In other words, Michael Gira is one sick little puppy. There is harmony in his savage portrayals of empty submission to torture and honestly in his slipping away of self. Brutal self loathing and a vicious need of self-punishment dominate these unpleasant tales and musings, with the sharpened sting of drug enhanced delusions of mind and body slipping away into nothingness. Only from the mind of a tortured, clinically depressed soul could tales such as these sprout; ugly and black with poisonous fangs, sickly perverse and bitterly cruel. This collection is not for the squeamish or light hearted, or even for those looking for the bloodbath type of horror musings; however it does contain more searching of the true illness of mind and body than the merely tediously disgusting works of Poppy Z. Brite or Cara Bruce. Michael Gira was also the singer/songwriter for the band The Swans, a dark and moody goth/industrial type band from the 80s and has done a few Cds on his own. This stories are as tortured and depressing as his music. My major complaint was after reading about three quarters of the way through the stories, they kind of began to blend into each other. Though the descriptions were almost poetic in their brutality, they became repetitive after awhile, different wordings of the same internal and external tortures. It was a little like having your depressed friend come over and stay a little too long, going on and on about how horrible their life is. But all in all, if you want to read something even more disturbing and disjointed than Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho, pick this up. Just don't read it at night, or when you are depressed. Also, I apologize for my punctuation, but until Amazon fixes its glitch of transforming punctuation into question marks and onehalf symbols, I find myself refraining from using them.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cold, clinical, beautiful and horrifying..., January 28, 2001
This review is from: The Consumer (Paperback)
The Consumer is not for everyone. I feel that it's a beautiful work and a very pure vision . . . full of horrifying, clinically written and presented "fairy tales" of human suffering and misery. This is a book of pain. There are some truly disturbing images in this collection. I was reading works by Peter Sotos (Index) and Irvin Welsh (Filth) during the same period as this one, and it fit in quite nicely. If you don't like to wince or have the wind knocked out of you by words, then don't even pick this up.
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