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Clinical, Brutal...: An Anthology of Writing with Guts Reviewed By Lavanya Karthik Of Bookpleasures.com
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Lavanya Karthik

Reviewer Lavanya Karthik: Lavanya is from Mumbai, India and is a licensed architect and consultant in environmental management. She lives in Mumbai with her husband and six-year old daughter. She loves reading and enjoys a diverse range of authors across genres.



 
By Lavanya Karthik
Published on March 8, 2010
 

Editor: Christopher Nosnibor
ISBN: 978-0-9556939-2-2
Publisher: Clinicality Press

Be warned, this is not a book for the squeamish or faint hearted


Editor: Christopher Nosnibor
ISBN: 978-0-9556939-2-2
Publisher: Clinicality Press

Click Here To Purchase Clinical, Brutal... An Anthology of Writing with Guts

Be warned, this is not a book for the squeamish or faint hearted.

Editor Nosnibor aims at creating a new genre with this book, one where "..everyday acts of violence (are) recounted crisply, factually and using technical rather than literary flourishes." It is aimed at what he calls the 'post-CSI generation', suggesting a group of readers so jaded by the violence freely available in the media now, that a whole new level of explicit content is needed to draw their attention.

This book brings some very diverse writers of prose and poetry together, each examining expressions of rage and alienation.

The very first story, 'Blood on the Tracks' by Pablo Vision gives us a taste of what is to come in its riveting look into the mind of a tormented DJ who finally meets his hero. Vision's other piece in this collection, the visceral 'The Battlefield of Carnivores' is hair raising, yet thought provoking. 'For reasons unknown'by Richard Kovitch is another notable story, where the horror of a young suicide victim's corpse is surpassed by the greater horror of the voyeuristic crowd that collects around it.'The Wild Hunt'explores the realm of the fantastic, while 'Papanicolau Test: A Grand Guignol listens in on a man's interior voice as he deals with one domestic argument too many.

Not all these stories are explicit in their descriptions of violence; some, like 'The Quest Part 4' and 'My Last Photograph' are tightly written examinations of sudden death. The grim tone of the book is relieved by two flashes of humour - Vincent Clasper's 'Surgery', with its graphic desription of a doctor's explosive demise, and 'Solid as a Rock', where a frustrated office worker decides to show a colleague just how hard his 'soft phone' is.

Given the intent behind writing of this nature, a very fine line seperates the gritty from the gratuitous, and this book does not always tread it carefully. Eschewing literary flourishes is still no excuse for avoiding a plot, and some of these stories offer little more than gleefully described scenes of violence peppered with medical terminology. Yet others , like ‘Frenzy of the Flesh’ fall victim to self conscious writing , and the awkward turns of phrase (“wad of liquid genetics”, “love member”) peppering a description of an act of shocking violence will probably inspire giggles rather than gasps.

An interesting, if uneven, experiment in forcing its reader to confront the 'beast within'.


Click Here To Purchase Clinical, Brutal... An Anthology of Writing with Guts