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Feral Class
Feral Class is Marc Garrett's deeply personal and thought-provoking exploration of his early years, chronicling his journey as a working-class artist navigating a world that often rejects them. Through humorous, vivid storytelling and incisive critique, Garrett explores how his upbringing shaped his identity, forging a path that defied societal expectations. How can one survive, let alone thrive, as part of what Garrett describes as the feral class: a group of individuals who, like him, exist outside traditional institutions and thrive in the margins, using resourcefulness and rebellion to carve out their own artistic spaces? Weaving together personal memories, political reflections, and the struggles of working-class artists, Feral Class challenges the elitism of the art world. It celebrates the radical potential of those who refuse to conform. Garrett's narrative is both an intimate selfportrait and a rallying cry for artists who refuse to be tamed. Passionate, unfiltered, and insightful, this book is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of class, creativity, and resistance.
218 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 1, 2026
This is a difficult book for me to review objectively — and probably all the better for it.
I know Marc, and that inevitably shaped how I experienced Feral Class. There’s a familiarity in the voice and in some of the territory it explores that made it feel less like I was simply reading a book, and more like I was connecting with something lived and real. That sense of authenticity runs all the way through it.
It’s not always an easy read — in places I found it unexpectedly triggering — but not in a gratuitous way. More in the sense of being prompted to reflect on parts of my own past and the stories we quietly carry around with us. There’s an honesty here that feels hard-won, and I couldn’t help but feel that writing it must have been, at least in part, a cathartic process.
I’m aware that readers coming to this without that personal connection may experience it differently. It’s a very direct, personal piece of work, and it asks the reader to meet it on those terms. But for me, that was part of its strength.
What I didn’t expect was the effect it had afterwards. It stayed with me — enough to nudge me into starting to write some of my own story, which is probably as meaningful a response as any book can hope to inspire.
So yes, this is a subjective response to a deeply personal book. But if you’re open to something honest, reflective, and quietly challenging, Feral Class has a lot to offer. I am looking forward to reading the the next part of Marcs story
I know Marc, and that inevitably shaped how I experienced Feral Class. There’s a familiarity in the voice and in some of the territory it explores that made it feel less like I was simply reading a book, and more like I was connecting with something lived and real. That sense of authenticity runs all the way through it.
It’s not always an easy read — in places I found it unexpectedly triggering — but not in a gratuitous way. More in the sense of being prompted to reflect on parts of my own past and the stories we quietly carry around with us. There’s an honesty here that feels hard-won, and I couldn’t help but feel that writing it must have been, at least in part, a cathartic process.
I’m aware that readers coming to this without that personal connection may experience it differently. It’s a very direct, personal piece of work, and it asks the reader to meet it on those terms. But for me, that was part of its strength.
What I didn’t expect was the effect it had afterwards. It stayed with me — enough to nudge me into starting to write some of my own story, which is probably as meaningful a response as any book can hope to inspire.
So yes, this is a subjective response to a deeply personal book. But if you’re open to something honest, reflective, and quietly challenging, Feral Class has a lot to offer. I am looking forward to reading the the next part of Marcs story
May 1, 2026
The idea of a feral section of the working class is perhaps a good way to understand the exasperation we see in many of the working class people currently disaffected with traditional Labour politics. The 'feral class' is here described as the working class at their most oppressed - people whose lives are ridded with precarity, fear, violence, confusion and anxiety. In locations where traditional forms of working class community located in a shared industry have long been shattered.
Are you working class but without a warm sense of belonging, nor wrapped in a close supportive community? Do you feel an outsider down the local pub? Do you have ideas above your station? Do you yearn to be lifted out of the wretched banality of everyday struggles? This book may be for you.
The writing is compelling, at times raw and personal. It’s hard to put down.
Are you working class but without a warm sense of belonging, nor wrapped in a close supportive community? Do you feel an outsider down the local pub? Do you have ideas above your station? Do you yearn to be lifted out of the wretched banality of everyday struggles? This book may be for you.
The writing is compelling, at times raw and personal. It’s hard to put down.
May 11, 2026
This very readable book is an odd and intriguing beast - it's one part dark and troubling childhood memoir; one part tribute to the healing power of art and music; and one part an urgent manifesto to unleash the power of what Garrett calls 'the Feral Class', those outsiders and originals who could if given a chance bring energy and vision to our lives.
Oh, and it's very much a tribute to a remarkable mother.
It has sharpness and anger and tenderness; and is also, just when you least expect it, darkly funny.
Garrett makes it clear that the book was triggered by a serious brush with the Grim Reaper - cancer took him to the brink, a near-death experience that is described in a dreamlike style in the first chapter 'Fading Away'. And this feeling that we are all mortal and fragile gives the text a vivid urgency.
From then on it's short chapters, often less than a page long (the shortest 'Barry The Spider', just one sentence!) each one a vivid snapshot of a traumatic or significant moment or feeling or person. Each chapter is illustrated by a contemporary photo or a drawings by the author, some of them done at the time of the events described which gives them an amazing poignancy and immediacy.
Some of the chapter titles - particularly in the first half - give a pretty clear indication of the violence contained within - 'Head Through The Window', 'The Screamer' , 'Suicide At The Picnic; 'Fighting Nazis On The Train'. Others are a little more cryptic, such as 'Barry's Galleon Ship Disaster', 'Mr. Crow' 'The Dead Centurions'...
In the later sections of the book the childhood terrors of the first part recede - though by no means disappear - as the author finds some degree of agency; you can feel the warmth he feels towards those who show kindness, be it an understanding vicar or the life-enhancing camaraderie of the burgeoning Southend Punk-scene. Above all there is the overwhelming sense that creativity has the power to make sense of an incomprehensible world and to empower those at the sharp end of life. Even the most violent figures in young Marc's life seem to find some tranquility in the act of making things, be it furniture-making or boat-making or painting.
The book ends with a glimpse of optimism, with a final image of the author (at this stage in his early twenties) starting out on a new life away from Southend. The final paragraph - in which he sits listening to the flowing of the River Yeo and wondering whether this unaccustomed peace and relative security can be real - is a powerful moment of hope.
Oh, and it's very much a tribute to a remarkable mother.
It has sharpness and anger and tenderness; and is also, just when you least expect it, darkly funny.
Garrett makes it clear that the book was triggered by a serious brush with the Grim Reaper - cancer took him to the brink, a near-death experience that is described in a dreamlike style in the first chapter 'Fading Away'. And this feeling that we are all mortal and fragile gives the text a vivid urgency.
From then on it's short chapters, often less than a page long (the shortest 'Barry The Spider', just one sentence!) each one a vivid snapshot of a traumatic or significant moment or feeling or person. Each chapter is illustrated by a contemporary photo or a drawings by the author, some of them done at the time of the events described which gives them an amazing poignancy and immediacy.
Some of the chapter titles - particularly in the first half - give a pretty clear indication of the violence contained within - 'Head Through The Window', 'The Screamer' , 'Suicide At The Picnic; 'Fighting Nazis On The Train'. Others are a little more cryptic, such as 'Barry's Galleon Ship Disaster', 'Mr. Crow' 'The Dead Centurions'...
In the later sections of the book the childhood terrors of the first part recede - though by no means disappear - as the author finds some degree of agency; you can feel the warmth he feels towards those who show kindness, be it an understanding vicar or the life-enhancing camaraderie of the burgeoning Southend Punk-scene. Above all there is the overwhelming sense that creativity has the power to make sense of an incomprehensible world and to empower those at the sharp end of life. Even the most violent figures in young Marc's life seem to find some tranquility in the act of making things, be it furniture-making or boat-making or painting.
The book ends with a glimpse of optimism, with a final image of the author (at this stage in his early twenties) starting out on a new life away from Southend. The final paragraph - in which he sits listening to the flowing of the River Yeo and wondering whether this unaccustomed peace and relative security can be real - is a powerful moment of hope.
May 2, 2026
This is remarkable book; not only does it recount in sharp and daunting detail the author’s experiences in claustrophobic domestic circumstances, growing up on a council estate in Southend-On-Sea in the 1970s and 80s, but it somehow retains a voice from that time that feels remarkably close to the moment of experience. At times there is very little distance placed between a reader and the rawness. This can be dismaying, and if you do not want to read accounts of bullying, sexual violence, mental struggles or overbearing masculinity, then you may think twice before reading this book (and this review). Although that is far from all there is to ‘Feral Class’, and it is very definitely not what is most important about it.
For here there are the fine details of childhood discoveries and bewilderments, the warmth of friendship and the splintering of connections, the innovations of desperation (pretending failing eyesight, developing a limp) and living with the consequences of deception, the mind’s ingenious creations (“I noticed a thick, winding fog slowly slip in through the gap…. It floated over my dad…. The figure began to slap his face repeatedly”) and the ambits and devices for dodging the violence of fathers. Among these modes of escape is a developing voice; a self-articulation that at times breaks down, but other times creatively stutters as it changes from doubts about conformity to out-of-control rebellion, speaking warmth and compassion to prejudice and division; unlearning and unpicking. More than once, this reassembling threatens to pull everything apart and bring Garrett down, but even the moments of almost self-obliteration are told in a calm, direct way that lets the reader in to the rebuilding.
At times the confidentiality is shocking; writing of his early sexual experiences, it is as if we are hearing the voice of a fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year-old in the writing. Many (probably most) writers would choose to recompose these experiences, applying a mature lens to smooth out the vulnerability, to objectify the discomfort of inexperience, but Marc Garrett writes from within the vulnerability, speaking outwards from the experience itself, rather than of lessons learned or observations generalised. This is compelling.
I never slipped along the sentences in this book. I attended to every detail. For in them (aided by numerous private photos and Garrett’s artworks from the time) the book unpeels the contradictions of what composes a certain everyday life, bound up in circumstances; of his mum speeding over the wooden planks of the Wall of Death, a genius abusive father working either side of the fence (both drug dealer and police informer) while running a ‘black magic’ circle on the side, of the safe space created by a local vicar in which Marc finds a place to develop his art and which is burned down by his own brother, of the classroom where an art teacher tears up Marc’s work in front of the class (his mum comes into school next day and punches the teacher), of sudden interventions by authorities that lack explanation or care (social services removing Marc’s younger sister and he never sees her again; his grant being abruptly withdrawn two weeks into an Art degree).
As in all the great narratives, time here is not a given but a character. The temporal loopiness in ‘Feral Class means that while in one section an abusive father is sent to prison, in the next, set earlier, he is back; the reader is cleverly drawn into Marc’s feeling of being caged by circumstances, of living in a community conditioned to conflict and poverty like the psychic slaves of Squire Hendrick in ‘Children Of The Stones’.
All the more precious, then, are those moments when Marc can prise the bars of the cage a little wider; hiding in his room to “make strange cut-up sounds with broken, second-hand tape recorders”, learning folk wisdom and tales from kind witchy Granny Barlow, valuing a conservative sensibility to keep from “pointless fatalism”, at a friend’s Bar Mitzvah eating strange foods and hearing from “those who had experienced fascism first hand”, his finding the alternative scenes in Southend with their fanzines and punk and tribal anarchist green movement; learning that “Society can hurt us if we do not challenge its powerful mistakes”.
When Garrett does generalise, if briefly, it is to place himself and his family adjacent to working class families, but in a ‘feral class’. Never put down for large workforces or public services, atomised, working low paid lonely jobs as cleaners or in ‘hospitality’, with the nagging threat of homelessness and sickness, or the option of sex work. The number of Marc’s Southend acquaintances who meet an early death is unnervingly high.
Over everything hangs male violence, as the currency for getting on, getting by, around which women try to navigate; and all the time the awareness that no-one is prepared to share with the feral class the know-how for getting out. Marc’s escape route appears out of the blue – an unexpected act of kindness – and Marc finds a heaven that is “real” and “no longer captive to circumstance”.
For here there are the fine details of childhood discoveries and bewilderments, the warmth of friendship and the splintering of connections, the innovations of desperation (pretending failing eyesight, developing a limp) and living with the consequences of deception, the mind’s ingenious creations (“I noticed a thick, winding fog slowly slip in through the gap…. It floated over my dad…. The figure began to slap his face repeatedly”) and the ambits and devices for dodging the violence of fathers. Among these modes of escape is a developing voice; a self-articulation that at times breaks down, but other times creatively stutters as it changes from doubts about conformity to out-of-control rebellion, speaking warmth and compassion to prejudice and division; unlearning and unpicking. More than once, this reassembling threatens to pull everything apart and bring Garrett down, but even the moments of almost self-obliteration are told in a calm, direct way that lets the reader in to the rebuilding.
At times the confidentiality is shocking; writing of his early sexual experiences, it is as if we are hearing the voice of a fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year-old in the writing. Many (probably most) writers would choose to recompose these experiences, applying a mature lens to smooth out the vulnerability, to objectify the discomfort of inexperience, but Marc Garrett writes from within the vulnerability, speaking outwards from the experience itself, rather than of lessons learned or observations generalised. This is compelling.
I never slipped along the sentences in this book. I attended to every detail. For in them (aided by numerous private photos and Garrett’s artworks from the time) the book unpeels the contradictions of what composes a certain everyday life, bound up in circumstances; of his mum speeding over the wooden planks of the Wall of Death, a genius abusive father working either side of the fence (both drug dealer and police informer) while running a ‘black magic’ circle on the side, of the safe space created by a local vicar in which Marc finds a place to develop his art and which is burned down by his own brother, of the classroom where an art teacher tears up Marc’s work in front of the class (his mum comes into school next day and punches the teacher), of sudden interventions by authorities that lack explanation or care (social services removing Marc’s younger sister and he never sees her again; his grant being abruptly withdrawn two weeks into an Art degree).
As in all the great narratives, time here is not a given but a character. The temporal loopiness in ‘Feral Class means that while in one section an abusive father is sent to prison, in the next, set earlier, he is back; the reader is cleverly drawn into Marc’s feeling of being caged by circumstances, of living in a community conditioned to conflict and poverty like the psychic slaves of Squire Hendrick in ‘Children Of The Stones’.
All the more precious, then, are those moments when Marc can prise the bars of the cage a little wider; hiding in his room to “make strange cut-up sounds with broken, second-hand tape recorders”, learning folk wisdom and tales from kind witchy Granny Barlow, valuing a conservative sensibility to keep from “pointless fatalism”, at a friend’s Bar Mitzvah eating strange foods and hearing from “those who had experienced fascism first hand”, his finding the alternative scenes in Southend with their fanzines and punk and tribal anarchist green movement; learning that “Society can hurt us if we do not challenge its powerful mistakes”.
When Garrett does generalise, if briefly, it is to place himself and his family adjacent to working class families, but in a ‘feral class’. Never put down for large workforces or public services, atomised, working low paid lonely jobs as cleaners or in ‘hospitality’, with the nagging threat of homelessness and sickness, or the option of sex work. The number of Marc’s Southend acquaintances who meet an early death is unnervingly high.
Over everything hangs male violence, as the currency for getting on, getting by, around which women try to navigate; and all the time the awareness that no-one is prepared to share with the feral class the know-how for getting out. Marc’s escape route appears out of the blue – an unexpected act of kindness – and Marc finds a heaven that is “real” and “no longer captive to circumstance”.
May 3, 2026
Marc writes with complete honesty about his young life in Southend on Sea. This is a well written and captivating biography which really draws you in and keeps you there. Whilst there are very emotive issues this is lightened by humour and amazing inside. Admittedly if you have a background in Southend and are of a certain age you will recognise a lot of the landscapes which adds to the experience, however I think this is an autobiography that everyone will relate to
May 3, 2026
Marc Garrett explores a creative practice challenging institutional hierarchies. His latest book, Feral Class, is a highly readable, deeply personal exploration of his early years, chronicling the beginnings of his journey as a working-class artist navigating an arts scene that is often exclusive and elitist. Well worth a read!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews