Cartilage and Skin

by Michael James Rizza

Cartilage and Skin is a dark literary thriller about a loner named Dr. Parker. He leaves his city apartment on an indefinite quest, not for love or friendship, but for “a drop of potency.” Yet he is quickly beset by obstacles. Through a series of bad decisions, he ends up being stalked by a violent madman and scrutinized by the law for a crime he claims he did not commit.

Meanwhile, he finds himself becoming involved with a kind, generous divorced woman named Vanessa Somerset. She seems to him receptive, if not eager, to love. Little does she know, because he does not tell her, that he is on the run, his life is in shambles, and an absurd horror lurks close by, ready crash down on them.

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Michael James Rizza, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern New Mexico University. He is the author of the novel Cartilage and Skin (2013) and a monograph The Topographical Imagination of Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault (2015), as well as academic articles and short stories. He has won various awards for his writing, including a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. He is currently at work on a novel called Heirs to the Dead Author and a book-length study of DeLillo, Auster, and others.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read 12/16/14 - 12/30/14
2 Stars - Tread Lightly / A slow and strange book that leaves you wishing you you could face-punch the narrator
Pages: 328
Publisher: Starcherone Books
Released: 2013


I've read my fair share of books that featured narrators who were incredibly immense jerks. Disgrace featured a world class jerk. Saturday featured a hoity-toity jerk. Both of these books grated on my nerves, and the leading jerkyhead jerks kept pissing me off, and yet... against my better judgement, being the optimistic reader that I am, I continued to read, hoping for some kind of final-hour-redemption, only to end up totally aggravated and stewing over the hours I had wasted on them.

You can go ahead and add Michael James Rizza's Cartilage and Skin to that list. This book failed to grab me from the get-go. The pace was excruciatingly slow and the main dude - Dr. Parker - was a total sleazebag. The book starts out with our Parker picking up the mail for a reclusive female neighbor. Except, instead of giving her all of it, he begins keeping the packages of photos that an apparent "admirer" sends her. And then he begins fantasizing about her. And when the lust becomes almost too much to bear, he beings to stalk and harass her at her front door. Turns out she's this grotesquely large woman who used to be into this fetishist stuff and she knows he's been withholding those packages. Hell, she tells him that the dude whose been sending her the packages knows he's been keeping them, too.

So now he's all paranoid that this dude gonna come after him. Meanwhile, he's been humoring this sick little homeless kid - paying him to run errands for him so he doesn't have to leave the house - until the kid gets so sick that Parker has no choice but to call an ambulance, which suddenly brings this shitstorm of an investigation down around him. Apparently the boy's got a nasty history and had recently been abused pretty badly and Parker's the first one they're looking at. When Parker is called in and fails to offer the information the case worker and her investigators are looking for, his privacy is threatened.

In the midst of all this shit - the anxiety of the investigation and the paranoia of the photo fetish dude secretly stalking him - Parker meets Vanessa, who runs a vintage clothing store, and inadvertently but also kinda knowingly, pulls her naive ass into all of this shit too.

Parker plays like he's this anti-social, innocent victim of his circumstances but you get the feeling the whole way through that this guy is totally playing you. He's not an honest narrator and he's making everything worse by hanging around and instigating the situation.

It's not often I want to face-punch a protagonist. But the combination of Parker's sheer cluelessness, his ridiculous hyper-vigilance, disgustingly low self esteem, and the ease with which he lies and shrugs off the seriousness of his situation made me want to take him by the shoulders and shake him fucking silly.

I've read some of the reviews on this book and had a good laugh at the ones that claim it's a creepy read. The only thing that I found creepy about it was our narrator, a Grade A creeper if ever there was one. The few relationships he had were odd and malformed. The only person he ever really seemed to give a shit about was himself. And then there were these horrid moments within the book where Parker would divert from the actual novel and philosophize for page after page about shit I could care less about. Some of these digressions were borderline torturous. At a minimum, they were just plain ole boring.

If I could go back in time, to December 16th, the day I started this book, I'd tell myself not to bother. I'd explain to myself that if I picked it up and read it, I wouldn't feel right putting it down, and that when I got to the final three pages or so of the novel, two entire weeks later, I'd only end up pissed off and frustrated. So frustrated, in fact, that I would go on to immediately review the book, still feeling the heat and hatred those final few pages created in me...

[ipsit · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily one of the more creepy novels I’ve read in a few years, even though almost nothing traditionally “creepy” ever actually happens. Like most of the greatest examples of true terror, what’s so unnerving here comes from the perspective and the tone, carried in the strange dictation of the narrator, who is the archetypal model for a “creeper.” The narrator lives alone; stalks his reclusive neighbor, who may or may not star in fetish porn online; fixates on a homeless boy who hangs around outside his building in the street and who eventually goes missing; and each day orchestrates his way into unnecessary interactions with total strangers just to spend time near them. Rizza has a mesmerizing ability to get into the brain of an Asperger’s-ridden loner who may or may not be giving us the whole story about his intentions and his past, which makes even the most banal and everyday actions and descriptions carry a tense, compacting weight.

What’s even more disturbing is how the narrator doesn’t seem aware of the entirety of the story he’s telling. At sudden points, the meticulous and driving prose of the narrator’s monologue will shift, opening the story into passages that seem disassociated from the present. Stories within stories read as if the narrator is making a puppet of himself, a truly psychotic-seeming dose of brutal fantasy, which, when buried in the regular narrative, takes on a meta-sense of something wrong. As we continue alongside the narrator while he fumbles to maintain the guise of a normal life both for himself and those around him, that sense of something wrong slowly grows, and the gap between what we know and what we don’t know tightens, like a clamp around the neck.

Rizzo is so good at layering the voice with logic, justification, and an almost unconscious sense of vengeance on the part of the loser, that by the time you begin to feel it aching it’s too late. If you ever wanted to walk around in the head of that weird, white-van-driving neighbor on your street whom you just know has something buried in his backyard, this novel is your ticket.

[Durican Grenwulf · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an uncomfortable human experience from start to finish. It was worth it.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"McTeal waddled on."

[Angela Coughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the depressed tone of the book and the way the author describes it's characters as well as their actions. The use of adjectives does well to paint a picture of the many different scenarios within the novel. I enjoyed the interactions the main character carried out with strangers, and that he took on a fake persona every time. The idea of a loner being free to be who he wanted from one moment to the next and easily enter as well as exit other's lives was rather interesting. I tended to enjoy the more mundane scenes, such as the scenario at the bar more than the more peculiar and eerie scenarios, such as his odd relationship with his landlord and his neighbor. There was a part of the book where I was lost as it seemed to take a break from the main plot and jump scenes from chapter to chapter, yet I was still intrigued to read because each scenario was interesting and the descriptions would pull me in. Overall it was a fairly good read.