Fucked Up

It took me a year, but I read this twice. It deserved to have attention paid to it. 853 pages each one giving credit to the book's title. If you're considering this book, I hope it isn't your first >300 pager, if you're considering this book, I hope you've strayed into the darker sides of indie before, or more hopefully, read some splatterpunk/extreme horror before.

I rec reading splatterpunk, not because this is that, but because it is NOT that.

There's this dark place, a hole, an endless pit to hell..., in this pit is all the fucked up, depraved, human excrement, and lusts, and sins, and desires that are not polite to discuss, or to approve of, or to fantasize about. The indie authors we claim we admire, whose books we tuck away when company is around feature this place in the background of their stories. They acknowledge it. They want you to cringe and praise and bow at their willingness to even be near it.

I'm not impressed by that anymore.

The splatterpunks, the extreme horror, the legions of copycats. They see that hole, want to see if they can fuck it. They dive right in. Oh and that shit's fun, it can be a bit same-y, but it's fun.

I'm desensitized to that now.

But Damien Ark, doesn't just flirt with the extreme, he walks right up to it. Dances around it, maybe even crawls down into it a bit just to see how that feels. Fucked Up over the course of it's many many pages paints a picture of grief, and loss, and longing, and lust, and drugs, and desperation. And it's beautiful. It is visceral poetry, it's damnation beautified.

It's a coming of age road trip....with a bisexual schizophrenic psychopath confused drug addicted kid, through whose eyes we see the beauty of destruction, but also the pain of growing up, of being different, of feeling like everything is out to get you...

A book with the title Fucked Up, feels relatable at times. Probably that's a bad thing. Whatever.

It's long. It's not without flaws, characters can sometimes sound undifferentiated, the endless something-worse-always-around-the-corner can be tedious. But generally these issues at best might slow down a reader for a moment, a 1/4th star off at worst.

But yes, if you're someone who looks at trigger warnings, because you're worried about content....you'll find this to be shocking and offensive, maybe unreadable, if you look up trigger warnings because you think “more the merrier” perhaps you can appreciate the lines Ark does not cross, yet how close he comes, and how beautiful that border between can be.

I can't not compare this to House of Leaves, if only because of the space it takes on my shelf, and because like House what the book is about, it's genre, whatever, is a tad confusing. House of Leaves is a romance novel at it's heart, masquerading as a weird meta fictional horror novel.

Fucked Up is a beautiful coming of age novel about hope, joy, and overcoming obstacles, masquerading as depraved indie shi..lit.