Customer Reviews

The Consumer

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

As literature overall, this book is not really worth more than2 stars. But I give it 5 because it is immensely impacting and willremain with you forever once you've read it. I've never seen anythingelse quite like it. The cold, unrelenting, calculated villiany of these stories is amazing, and you will be consistently receiving powerful details that you did not want and never would've expected to get. Gira's music (the now disbanded Swans) is dark but not usually downright grotesque -- in his fiction, he seems dedicated to pulling up the most abominable arrangement of imagery and content that anyone could hope to imagine. He succeeds in his goal admirably.

As writing, this really is ridiculously wordy and articulate, much like Nick Cave's work. It is fancy prose for the sake of being fancy and intelligent-seeming. Some stories are toss outs and few of them have any particular point, other than to disturb you. But they *do* disturb you, to the core, and that is what is remarkable about them. It's hard to be genuinely horrifying, and it's tricky to write stories that make you physically nauseous. Gira's success in doing these things causes me to admire this book. It is vivid, important, and unforgettable. Too showy and one-track to be taken especially seriously as a work of literature, but too impacting and original to be ignored. A freak of a book, which is undoubtedly what Gira wants and expects it to be, which evokes a twisted, horrifying, and taboo world. The most perverse literature I've ever seen, and that includes De Sade.

This is one of the most refreshing books I have read in recent months. The writing is very explorative. The imagery is intricate, gruesome, organic, scatalogical. M. Gira imaginatively conveys the darker and seamier side of the psyche in his examinations of self-destruction, delusion, orgiastic excess and loss of identity. Definitively worth noticing.

I find this book really interesting. I don't think that it is a work of perversion. It is just written from a certain perspective. It is a really dark vision. Parts of it remind me of Beckett. You don't have to be a serial killer to read about serial killers. This is a book that I return again and again when all other books seem too pretentious or fake.

but if you like sick, twisted, disgusting images, then read this book and admire Gira for his detailed, brutal imagry. I like to call his style "Poetic Vomit", because, believe me, his stomach-turning text will do a number on your gag reflex...ENJOY!!!

Like most of the people here, I picked up The Consumer because it was written by the main man behind the legendary seminal group SWANS. Michael Gira is well known for his visceral lyrics and his brutal/beautiful music. In many ways, The Consumer continues in this trend by depicting brutality as something that can be both aesthetically pleasing and poetic at the same time. Most of The Consumer is made up of very short stories that almost seem like sadistic anecdotes written under the influence of hallucinogens. They were all written at different periods of time, too. Some of the stories were written during the eighties while others were written in the early nineties. It is pretty much a compilation of various pieces, and they definitely reflect upon the time they were written in correlation to what was going on in SWANS at the time. Comparisons to Burroughs can be made in some instances where Gira writes in a monotonous tone of voice while describing visceral accounts and repugnant scenarios. In other words, there is a definite parallel between the stories in this book and SWANS.

This book, while obvious that it is the work of an amateur writer, is really good.

People who wish to gain a deeper understanding of SWANS should read it.

This is bleak, bleak writing. Highly intoxicating and hypnotic, in its swirling, and chaotic industrial wasteland. Fleeting yet beautiful, like the last strands of light entering a nearly fully collapsed star. Gira is very poignant and calculated in his misanthropic delivery. Whether he talks about teenage kids exhausting brain cells on gas soaked rags, love encounters gone terribly wrong, masochistic fantasies, or hallucinations from a malignant ether realm...Gira remains poised and determined. Not for shock value, but rather for the love of describing the foul taste of his own self-hatred. This toxic, corrosive, and emotionally eroding narrative doesn't eschew nothing in its volatile path. Highly recommended to those of you that would like to slither away from the perks and peaks of materialism, and experience depravity and deprivation in all its ill-fated glory. I do warn you however: The visceral descriptions used to accentuate Gira's self-loathing come at a cost. The cost: the congealed mess left in your stomach.

Gira has a talent that might almost be called a gift for coming up with fascinating, vivid, and almost inevitably macabre scenarios for his short stories. Unfortunately, he seems to have trouble figuring out just exactly where to go with them sometimes. He also can't seem to get through a sentence without tossing in at least one gratuitous metaphor - a problem common among musicians who have honed their writing skill on lyrics, since lyrics are much closer to poetry than to prose in most cases. With practice and a firm-handed editor I predict better things, short story wise, from Mr. Gira.