Tales of the Madman Underground

I have so many feelings about this book.

Let's start it off with the content warnings: mental illness, mentioned abuse (verbal, physical, mental, sexual, neglect, you can list them all), mentioned cruelty to animals, prolific use of slurs (of all kinds), period typical biggotry (it's set in small town America in the 70's). Nothing is ever too explicit, but it's worth noting that all of this is in there.

For a young adult read, it's pretty fucked up.

This book is The Breakfast Club if the brain, the athlete, the princess, the criminal, all those guys and more were all also the basket case.

And I loved it. I loved it so much.

Every single character in this book is a real person. They are so fleshed out and three dimensional and believeable that I ache for them. All told through the lens of the kindest, most empathetic, most fucked and and angry specimen of a teenage boy you've ever come across in literature, Karl “Psycho” Shoemaker.

It's truly character driven and all of them are horrible and all of them are lovely. Two things can be true at once.

Masterfully written too. The way this book is arranged with every chapter feeling like its own short story (truly a series of tales from the madman underground) while also connecting to the main movement that takes place over the span of 6 days. Overtime the story becomes more and more grounded in the present and it culminates in such a relieving catharsis. It's great. It's fantastic.

Every single person on Earth is flawed and will stay flawed until the day they die. And every flawed person can still find joy and love and friendship. Isn't that tragic and isn't that wonderful?