I Will Rot Without You by Danger Slater
My rating: 3/5 cats
look, sometimes love is gross.
not that “white people making puppy eyes at each other” gross like in gum commercials or whatever
or even those inappropriate pdas on the late-night subway where maybe you don’t want to see so much of a stranger’s pubic hair exposed under fluorescent lighting.
but more the kind of gross where the obsession with your love-object causes you to chop off your fingers and sew them into her skin, just so you will always be together and able to keep tabs on her. or the aftermath of a disastrous love affair, whose residual emotional toxicity takes the shape of millions of cockroaches or pestilent mold. or the love that does not end even after the death of one of its participants, in the most literal version of that scenario.
you know, that kind of gross love.
and there’s so much gross on display here. buckets of gross. cupboards full of squirming grossness. gross getting so topheavy with gross that it drops off of the gross to which it is attached and falls onto the floor, spreading the gross into all-new corners.
all for love, baby…
don’t let my three stars cats fool you, because i did really like this book. or more, i appreciated it. it’s a necessary and raw look at all the dark intensity of new love old love broken love wrong love and i can definitely pinpoint times in my romantic past where i would have read this book and been like GET OVER HERE AND LET ME SPANK YOU LIKE A CHOIRBOY, DANGER SLATER FOR HOW RIGHT YOU ARE!
but now i’m all old and cool and mellow and i can read this with a nostalgic smile and a wince, but it doesn’t hit me the way it once may have, in my heady youth.
however, as a literary achievement apart from my personal experience of reading it, it’s very impressive. it takes all the beautiful and the ugly parts of romantic relationships and combines and distributes them into so many different configurations and proportions that it’s like this tiny encyclopedia of hurt and desperate love and ruin and optimism and nightmarish howling and it ends up just this side of beautiful, on the beautiful-horrifying coin-toss.
it’s bizarro, but it’s bizarro with a vision. it’s splatter, but the good kind of splatter, where you get to see a pretty pretty butterfly in the bloody rorschach test
and as great as this inscription to ME is
the dedication’ll make anyone swoon.
nicely done, danger slater, you gross old softie.
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best week ever – in which i receive three books in the mail i really really want to read and maggie really really wants to sleep on.
best week ever part two:
which comes with its own free bugs
and cards!
best week ever part one
best week ever part three
