Published: August 2014
590 pages
Available as Paperback e-Book
Size (electronic form of this book): 0Kb
Category: Fiction
Language: English
On sale at: Amazon
Read Excerpts from the Trilogy here.
To read Richard Kalich is to be plunged into an uncompromising world, to be exposed to dark deeds and strange thoughts, to be challenged. The novels collected here tug at our concepts of civility, identity, truth and art. They are postmodern fables; dark, shocking, funny, astute, and compulsively readable. They share a ferocious energy and break down standard notions of plot and character to form a body of work that is distinctive. They are unsettling books, relentless in their demands on the reader – who must pay attention, question the narrator, and stare unflinching at the nightmarish visions unfolding before him or her. The works are written to provoke; the reader may want to recoil and turn away, and yet find themselves caught up in the galloping pace of the plot. But there is also room for laughter, to find humour in the outlandish adventures of Charlie P in particular. Unsurprisingly, the humour is often a perverse, provocative kind. Kalich doesn’t want his readers getting too comfortable. As he would surely say, what is the value of a book that doesn’t question cosy notions of what it is to be human, to be civilised, to be cultured? Instead of answers, we are given shattered fragments, from which we must try to piece together the whole. Kalich experiments with narrative form and characters, pulling us into a murky place where we are left to wonder: what is the difference between Kalich the author, Kalich the character and Kalich the man? Can we ever know what is going on inside the head of another human being?