Reviewed by Sarah, 4/10/15
This is not one of Vonnegut’s best known titles, but it deserves just as much attention as Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, and any of the others. If you like stories about well-meaning people who do terrible things out of ignorance, this is it! What do I mean by terrible things? Try the boy narrator who fires a gun out his folk’s upstairs window as a celebration of his burgeoning manhood only to find that he just accidentally killed the pregnant neighbor lady, nailing her right between the eyes. Now he’s forever known to his community as “Deadeye Dick.” If this makes you laugh rather than cry, you’re a Vonnegut reader. The dark comedy of this novel is offset at times by a surprising warmth and gentleness regarding humanity. It’s as though Vonnegut is assessing all of our human fallibility and laughing with us at its absurdity. Essentially, this is some of the best fiction I’ve read and I’m a pretty persnickety reader.
Tosches creates a narrator that he none too subtly suggests might just be himself. The guy’s name is Nick, he’s a writer, he’s in his fifties, friends with Keith Richards…pretty much Tosches bio. I guess that all sounds fine, but then there is the troubling bit about Nick liking to drink the blood of pretty young women. The narrator feasts on their blood as a sort of life force, finding that his meals taste better and his body feels more alive after literally consuming a part of these women. While this makes the novel sound like a vampire fantasy book, it is something more akin to magical realism. Reading it feels a bit like falling into someone else’s nightmare, watching him live parasitically, and realizing that he feels zero remorse for his actions. You probably won’t like this narrator much as a person, but it’s a well crafted novel and an interesting read.
Reviewed by Nick, 2/27/15
Reviewed by Kaili, 12/10/14
