We Can Never Leave This Place

I actively hated reading this book. 'Why not DNF it?' you ask? Unlike a big doorstop of a tome that overstays its welcome, this story comes in just shy of a hundred pages and I figured I'd stick around to see just how bad the trainwreck would get. It turns out, pretty bad!

Maybe I was never destined to enjoy this one because I never like child protagonists, especially when they're unreliable narrators and have overactive imaginations that warp everyday events into Kafkaesque oddities. And we jump into the surreal pretty quickly, but with that comes the steady downward trend of my enjoyment.

I'm not a stranger or particularly opposed to difficult content being present in books as long as it serves a narrative purpose. But what we got here felt like a list of taboos being checked off just to say they were present. We got: child abuse, animal death, murder, necro-cannibalism, incest, rape, decapitation, and an ever-present layer of literal ankle-deep raw sewage on the floor of every scene. And instead of a slow build-up to instill a sense of dread in the reader of any one of these things happening, you're just hit over the head with one after another. Towards the end I wasn't thinking, "I really hope X doesn't happen even though I think it will," but rather, "sure, this may as well happen too at this point, why not?"

There is a story and a message here about inherited generational trauma buried under all the detritus and filth, but it's more trouble than it's worth to dig it out. The biggest surprise of this book was that it was written by an author I've previously read (and really enjoyed!). But after this "Wouldn't it be fucked up if..." Mad Libs exercise of a book, I'm gonna need some time before I revisit their work again.