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This Boring Apocalypse

Brandi Wells (Goodreads Author)

4.33 · Rating details · 55 ratings · 13 reviews

“Keen, shocking, and shockingly funny, This Boring Apocalypse glitters like a mirrorball of razors above a dance floor packed with severed legs. Each page is a grisly prism. Each page flashes with a kind of light. In tiny, honed chapters, this book creates a world where love bleeds into horror, where there is neither life nor death but a life-death hybrid, where everything ...more

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Published March 2nd 2015 by Civil Coping Mechanisms

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Average rating 4.33 ·

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· 55 ratings · 13 reviews

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Jan 22, 2015 Lori rated it liked it

Shelves: arc-reviewers-copy, downloads, fiction

Read 2/17/15 - 2/18/15
3 Stars - Recommended to fans of the Blake Butler and Ben Spivey style literature
Pages: 122
Publisher: Civil Coping Mechanisms
Releases: March 2015

I should start a "Note Worthy" review series, specifically for the books I've taken notes on as I read. I feel like this is becoming a recent trend. First, for The Country of Ice Cream Star, to keep track of the amazingly beautiful, but initially complicated, invented dialect. And now for This Boring Apocalypse, which is just one Read 2/17/15 - 2/18/15
3 Stars - Recommended to fans of the Blake Butler and Ben Spivey style literature
Pages: 122
Publisher: Civil Coping Mechanisms
Releases: March 2015

I should start a "Note Worthy" review series, specifically for the books I've taken notes on as I read. I feel like this is becoming a recent trend. First, for The Country of Ice Cream Star, to keep track of the amazingly beautiful, but initially complicated, invented dialect. And now for This Boring Apocalypse, which is just one of the most bizarrely written lit-fic novels I've read in a long time.

Here we have a woman who attempts to eat, and then begins to dismember, her girlfriend. Like, literally removes her body parts, starting with her legs, which she carries around with her and stores in her closet. What initially appeared to be a tender sexual act suddenly becomes tainted by her fear that her girlfriend is cheating on her, and so next she removes her arms. To keep her captive. And then she wants to reduce her to her smallest functioning parts, so she begins to remove the organs and then her head. So all she is now is just a hollowed out torso. Fucking weird, right? It's almost like she's playing with a doll, or a toy. There's no blood. There's no fighting. There's just this pop and bam! Body parts removed.

And like a kid who grows bored with their toys, our narrator tires of the girlfriend, disposes of her and chases down a man to play with. She wastes no time in removing his arms and legs. Pop. Pop. Off they go.

Then she sulks because she feels her own body is in control of itself and she desires to be in control of IT. While trying to control her body, she injures herself. This injury, which festers rapidly and painfully, ends up re-birthing her girlfriend. What the fuck, right?

As she's nursing her festering wound, she says "it is important to become part of the horror, lest we'll be controlled by it. Then the horror will overwhelm us. But if we are a part of it, we can at least control the part of it we are." And that's basically what the rest of the book amounts to, her need for control, at all costs. Of herself and of others. Whether this stems from a desire for companionship, or a place of intense jealousy, we ultimately find ourselves sucked down into her diseased brain. A mental rabbit hole we cannot claw our way back out of. It's a complete horrorshow.

People are planted in the ground by their feet and become trees, lab rats don white lab coats and perform experiments on infants, people she tires of and lets go return to her in the strangest ways... it's like an apocalypse of her mind.

Told in short, fantastical chapters, This Boring Apocalypse is a fast paced, increasingly bizarre novel filled with the surreal and distorted imagery that is the stuff nightmares are made of. ...more

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Dec 25, 2014 Leia Penina rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: everyone

Last night I made monsters with paper, read This Boring Apocalypse, and drank. I made many monsters. I like drinking. I was not bored.

In This Boring Apocalypse, the reader finds a patchwork woman, who, over the course of this book, is dissembled, reassembled, investigated, consumed, revamped. Erotic-life and erotic-death (as well as whatever is between that) are so intimated bonded here. I absolutely adored the appetite of Apocalypse. Full of peculiar, fantastic, anxious moments that I didn’t Last night I made monsters with paper, read This Boring Apocalypse, and drank. I made many monsters. I like drinking. I was not bored.

In This Boring Apocalypse, the reader finds a patchwork woman, who, over the course of this book, is dissembled, reassembled, investigated, consumed, revamped. Erotic-life and erotic-death (as well as whatever is between that) are so intimated bonded here. I absolutely adored the appetite of Apocalypse. Full of peculiar, fantastic, anxious moments that I didn’t want to end. At one point the narrator tells us, “They have all taken parts of her and inserted those parts into themselves, so I cannot bear to part with any of them.” That kind of broke my heart.

The connection between consuming one into another’s body & grief became immediately apparent. I didn’t want her to have to part with anything, I feared for her. I am in love with this patchwork woman. I am also in love with her lover, who is also her torturer. It’s difficult to say who captured who really, there’s so much beautiful (terrifying) touching, tasting, absorbing. Yet I can imagine no better an ending than the narrator coming to terms with her own mythological journey as she says “We step back and watch our lives.”

If this apocalypse ever happened I would simultaneously be in awe & alarm of it: the abject loneliness; a threat both external and internal—manifesting physically: oozing, pus-ing, swelling, leaking; the menace of mortality (the menace of the spontaneous overflow of feeling). Like looking at something so beautiful you deny—and yearn—for its existence & you have no other choice but to laugh—there is humor here too! Wells affirms the strange beauty of human design, while exploring how vulnerable the body is; how vulnerable we all are at the scrutiny of our own autonomy.

*I do feel a little safer about my chances of surviving an apocalypse after reading this book.
*You should read this book. You will like it.
*I promise. I am trustworthy. I like cats.
*& vultures.
*********************
...more

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Nov 13, 2014 Brian Alan Ellis rated it really liked it

This Boring Apocalypse is like The Notebook meets Re-Animator.

But only almost.

Only not at all.

Really, it’s a sadistically imaginative child playing house then burning down the house.

It’s very funny.

And scary.

Read more of this review @ www.revolutionjohnmagazine.wordpress.com

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Mar 07, 2015 David Bridges rated it really liked it

I finished The Boring Apocalypse and last time I checked I still have all my appendages. This was a absurd, violent, and at time poignant read. It took me minute to get the rhythm, requiring me to reread some of the pages, but once I found the rhythm I enjoyed it. I found it funny and disturbing which are two words you don't always hear together. If you only enjoy more traditional narratives this may not be the book for you. With that being said if you can take a deep breath and stop trying to ...more

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Nov 13, 2014 David Keaton rated it it was amazing

Best. Cookbook. Ever. Not being a smart ass. This book made me hungry, made me wish I cared enough about people, and by proxy their bodies, so that I could also rip them open like Christmas morning. Read this if you want to see what happens when an author can't get close enough to her subjects by more conventional means and literally reaches inside. Read it if you want to get an idea how intoxicating such a disassembly could be. In a weird way, it reminded me of Cameron Pierce's Ass Goblins of ...more

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Mar 03, 2015 Matt rated it really liked it

This is more straight-up body horror, or maybe fractured fairy tale than it is Wells' contribution to the genre exemplified by Scorch Atlas or Apocalypse, Baby. What I mean is, this already takes place in a radically detourned space, and it's a single (more or less) narrative thread, as a singular protagonist tries to make sense out of this world where she (?) lives.

She creates a mate, tortures and eats him; creates another, and then things get weirder. Relationships between the trio shift, ...more

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Mar 15, 2015 Andrew Miller rated it it was amazing

The mostly sublimely bizarre tale of love and loss and human consumption I've ever, EVER come across. Wells crafts a story of the apocalyptic nature of our relationships and the tedium that they can create through the language of sadistic murder, zombiesque imagery and skinned cats. For the number of times Wells pokes fun at cliche, her novel is anything but and I guaranteed it to be one of the least cliche, most unique views of modern human interactions.

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Nov 15, 2014 xTx xTx rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2015

brandi never disappoints.
i loved this.

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Aug 01, 2015 KnNaRfF rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

As I was reading this book my face did not know if it should be grinning or looking bemused, so it kept alternating between the two expressions. As I
continued to read the poetic flow of the story began to feel more like a logical reality to me than the reality we are forced to live on a daily basis.

Brandi Wells is an incredibly talented author. I am very grateful that there are Indie publishers (like CCM) who have the guts to publish very original and imaginative books like 'This boring ...more

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Aug 03, 2015 Julia rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015

I really liked this. It was magnificently absurd, and I spent the majority of my read fixating on how masterful it is, the craft of taking those tiny seeds of realness and... extrapolating them. It's a crazy read, an eye-opening read, and sometimes I said oh dear that's just silly and sometimes I felt very, very sad.

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Jun 12, 2016 Ryan Bradford rated it really liked it

This Boring Apocalypse is kind of like if torture and dismemberment were a jazz piece. It feels very seat-of-the-pants, but with an underlying complexity. It's like trying to ascribe logic to a nightmare, or trying to assign order to a mass of body parts thrown at you. Violent minutia fuels and leaps, which don't always land, but are often incredibly funny and absurd.

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