It'll have you smiling while it hammers you with gut punches.
Erudite and coarse, guttural and smooth, dialectical and high brow; the story see saws to an explosive conclusion with increasing recklessness. The hope in the midst of hopelessness, the violence in a peaceful countryside, the misunderstandings of race, the destructiveness of drugs; all are encapsulated within the decaying body of post apartheid Africa. This is powerful writing: honest, forceful, unapologetic. It strips the scenery of my youth: cove rock, Nahoon, Coffee Bay of its innocence, and replaces it with the cold, anarchic, inevitable reality of modern day South Africa. Armageddon pales in comparison to the bleak landscape he project; psychological and physical. His message only the tough, the truly broken survive, is the ultimate expression of bleakness. A great read. Highly recommended in its awful vision of a today without future.
Loved this book! Cutting humour and gripping plot. So hard these days to find a book that offers pleasure on every page and this is definitely one of those!
If you like Brookmyre, you'll love this book. A bit graphic at times, so not for the faint of heart. Very entertaining and engaging with superb descriptions and a good bit of SA local colour.
It's all shits and giggles until you piss off a couple guys with guns.
But in all honesty, it really was a hilarious read for the most part. For the rest, it was an interesting exploration of morality. How much of it is really black and white and how much is a hundred different shades of grey. Felt like PHIL1001: Ethics all over again.
ABOUT MICHAEL
Oh geez. I hate these things. No matter what I say, it’s going to sound poncey, and let’s face it: this is the literary equivalent of farting in your hand and smelling it. Nobody reads them and bios never sold a book. So I tell you what—why not buy one of my books and come up with your own paragraph about what you think of me. You don’t even have to write it down if you don’t want to. You don’t even have to come up with it in the first place. Just buy a book and everybody wins.
Latest BLOG POSTS
How to Look After Someone Else’s Goldfish [The Evil Jellyfish Saga, Part 5]
Mr Herschell from downstairs has the weirdest friggin’ goldfish! Lucky for him, I have some pretty solid experience looking after peculiar pets. Here are some hard-earned pieces of wisdom I’d like to share with you.
A Letter from the Watery Depths [The Evil Jellyfish Saga, Part 4]
Friends, some of you have expressed concern about my downstairs neighbor, Mr Herschell, after I happened to shove him into an infernal gateway to the watery hell of Yaddith-Gho. However, I can confidently report that Mr Herschell is fine and well in his new oceanic home.
How to Overcome Your Fears and Take Back Your Life [The Evil Jellyfish Saga, Part 3]
If, like me, you’ve recently become a host for a parasitic sentient jellyfish with aspirations of godhood, lost your home to an invasion of cockroaches on a fast-tracked evolutionary path to nuclear civilization, and suspect that this may all be due to your downstairs neighbor’s dabbling in black sorcery, you’re probably feeling a little down in the dumps – or even outright terrified for your own survival.