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Mutilation Song
Thomas hears voices, the most prominent of which is that of a demon called Dinn. The demon re-frames Thomas' declining mental health as a kind of nightmarish adventure, an opportunity to leave behind the world that he has known and join the forces of hell.
When Thomas takes the demon at his word, applying himself to his so-called training, he finds himself being called upon to perform unspeakable acts. But Dinn has painted the world in such dark, forbidding colours that soon Thomas lacks both the will and the means to seek the help he so desperately needs.
When Thomas takes the demon at his word, applying himself to his so-called training, he finds himself being called upon to perform unspeakable acts. But Dinn has painted the world in such dark, forbidding colours that soon Thomas lacks both the will and the means to seek the help he so desperately needs.
- GenresHorror
250 pages, Paperback
Published August 15, 2018
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262 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 14, 2018
NOW AVAILABLE!!!
”...nothing could be more pointless than to mourn the passing of a world that has only ever meant you harm.”
between the form and the content, this book is challenging in many ways, and i don’t see it making oprah’s book club anytime soon.
even though i have been shamefully negligent of czp of late - good at purchasing the books, bad at getting to ‘em, i do generally adore their contributions to the dark fantasy/literary horror part of my heart and when this one was pitched to me as “monstrously…horrendously bleak,” that it was “exquisitely written” and would “destroy me in a good way,” well, i scoffed and swaggered, figuring my appreciation for bareknuckled grit lit and maudlin thomas hardy had me covered across the entire “bleak” gamut. but that’s back when i thought “bleak” meant something along the lines of “dismal,” “full of misfortune,” “pessimistic.” in canada, it apparently means “a relentless assault of pain and suffering that doesn’t even give you a moment to process before it shoves more at you until you JUST CAN’T EVEN.”
just another of those slight regional linguistic variations, like how they call colored pencils “pencil crayons.”
interestingly enough, i once made a blanket announcement in my review for another czp title that the collective "you" couldn't handle it. this one might be worse.
and it makes you WORK for the pleasure of having your head exploded - it’s written in a claustrophobically baroque style with prose you have to chew your way through. it’s not that it’s difficult, vocabulary-wise, but it is stuffed-to-bursting with words and highblown syntax doubling back in circuitous patterns, repeating, revising, speechifying, layering words on words on words until you wanna yell “talk like a person, sir!!”
Given free rein I would cleanse this program of all rhythm and restraint and periodicity and instead submit every single trainee to an unremitting stream of horrors. I would devise an assault of dazzling ferocity — better to let the legion go unreplenished than admit even one candidate who bears the taint of the mundane — and exterminate them all.
yo, jason hrivnak, you tweet? nah, if words were music, this would be you:
ahhhh ya burnt!
i typically prefer my writing less… deliberate, but there are some passages here so gorgeous they’ll blow your mind. in a good way, not in that way from before with the forcefeeding of words and the animals fleeing in terror.
it’s an immersion into the madness of a character named thomas, which accounts for the claustrophobic frenzy of the prose; it's dizzying and grim and disorienting, where time bends, motifs recur, stories are concluded many pages removed from where they began, and the focus is on a demon named dinn, who is shepherding thomas into the ranks of hell’s army using pain as a necessary converter, along with the desecration of the body through self-abnegation and the application of beautiful violence to carve a convert’s path towards something like a religious ecstasy, only more, you know, demony.
the process is … a lot, and one of the interesting details is that, in order to pass the training, it’s not just about being eeeevil,
but also being willing to self-inflict some of that suffering. dinn recounts the tale of one of his less-successful recruits:
sorry for such a long quote, but that’s what happens when every sentence is swollen with words like he's some diabolical proust and it’s difficult to tell, in a book of block-text unrelieved by paragraph breaks, when to cut it off. that passage i find very successful, even though ordinarily, i would call “too many notes” on it.
the breaking-down process isn’t all physical - it also involves isolating the individual from friends and family, although family may be doing itself in just fine on its own, The institution of the family is a damage-factory. It’s purpose is to ensure that only the very worst traits of the forebear are passed along to the child, each new generation thereby systematically divested of both the desire and the ability to improve.
there's also pain inflicted through nostalgia and loss and visions and oh, so many other ways:
I led him onward into a detailed mirage I’d crafted for this very occasion, a wide patch of floor that was lit from above as by a single downward-pointed spotlight. A long table stood athwart his path and as he approached it he saw that its surface was covered with all the treasures he had lost over the years. An inordinate number of the objects in question originated from back in his childhood, many so deeply buried in memory that but for the mishap of this late encounter he might never have thought of them again. Here lay the storybooks that had lulled him to sleep, favourite toys miraculously healed from states of irredressable breakage. The puppy that had died just weeks after entering his childhood home lay sleeping peacefully in a nest of blankets, calmly and factually restored from the death as through some brilliant form of forgetting. Other items on the table came from later phases of his life and these induced a more complex form of heartbreak for their status here was necessarily more strained, each having been treasures despite the certainty that they would eventually be lost.
there really is some beautiful writing here, and some descriptions that are going to stay with me, not all of them of the tooth-extraction/dismembered animal variety.
three stars because the style isn't my personal cuppa, but the guy sure can write.
”No wonder the world looked empty and blank, no wonder you saw no place within it for a creature as ignoble as yourself. By the onset of adolescence every mundane is a war-veteran and like every war-veteran he longs for a return of the peril in which he knew himself most alive. The adult is not the apotheosis but rather the wreckage of the child, the tall thin shadow of a toddler-king who reigns with the dawn at his back.
***********************************************
hoooooooo....
not...an easy read. i feel battered, and i'm going to need to sit with this a bit before i can sort out thoughts and feelings and all that.
come to my blog!
”...nothing could be more pointless than to mourn the passing of a world that has only ever meant you harm.”
between the form and the content, this book is challenging in many ways, and i don’t see it making oprah’s book club anytime soon.
even though i have been shamefully negligent of czp of late - good at purchasing the books, bad at getting to ‘em, i do generally adore their contributions to the dark fantasy/literary horror part of my heart and when this one was pitched to me as “monstrously…horrendously bleak,” that it was “exquisitely written” and would “destroy me in a good way,” well, i scoffed and swaggered, figuring my appreciation for bareknuckled grit lit and maudlin thomas hardy had me covered across the entire “bleak” gamut. but that’s back when i thought “bleak” meant something along the lines of “dismal,” “full of misfortune,” “pessimistic.” in canada, it apparently means “a relentless assault of pain and suffering that doesn’t even give you a moment to process before it shoves more at you until you JUST CAN’T EVEN.”
just another of those slight regional linguistic variations, like how they call colored pencils “pencil crayons.”
interestingly enough, i once made a blanket announcement in my review for another czp title that the collective "you" couldn't handle it. this one might be worse.
and it makes you WORK for the pleasure of having your head exploded - it’s written in a claustrophobically baroque style with prose you have to chew your way through. it’s not that it’s difficult, vocabulary-wise, but it is stuffed-to-bursting with words and highblown syntax doubling back in circuitous patterns, repeating, revising, speechifying, layering words on words on words until you wanna yell “talk like a person, sir!!”
Given free rein I would cleanse this program of all rhythm and restraint and periodicity and instead submit every single trainee to an unremitting stream of horrors. I would devise an assault of dazzling ferocity — better to let the legion go unreplenished than admit even one candidate who bears the taint of the mundane — and exterminate them all.
yo, jason hrivnak, you tweet? nah, if words were music, this would be you:
ahhhh ya burnt!
i typically prefer my writing less… deliberate, but there are some passages here so gorgeous they’ll blow your mind. in a good way, not in that way from before with the forcefeeding of words and the animals fleeing in terror.
it’s an immersion into the madness of a character named thomas, which accounts for the claustrophobic frenzy of the prose; it's dizzying and grim and disorienting, where time bends, motifs recur, stories are concluded many pages removed from where they began, and the focus is on a demon named dinn, who is shepherding thomas into the ranks of hell’s army using pain as a necessary converter, along with the desecration of the body through self-abnegation and the application of beautiful violence to carve a convert’s path towards something like a religious ecstasy, only more, you know, demony.
the process is … a lot, and one of the interesting details is that, in order to pass the training, it’s not just about being eeeevil,
but also being willing to self-inflict some of that suffering. dinn recounts the tale of one of his less-successful recruits:
From the very start he showed a distinct tendency to employ mundane notions of an unvolatile self, treating his body as some static reservoir for accumulated knowledge and power. He dismantled external targets with great aptitude and rapacity but balked like a child whenever called upon to direct that violence at himself. The final outrage took place just a few months after his recruitment. I ordered him to shear the flesh from his feet and in reply he looked at me as if there had been some misunderstanding, as if his little studies and little spells had endowed him with a snowflake-perfect uniqueness I would be foolish to damage or change. At that moment he seemed to regard me as some petty university bureaucrat, a dean who refused to recognize a prerequisite that he’d already and with distinction obtained. I could only shake my head. ‘I have seen your kind before,’ I said. ‘You believe that the wounds raddling my body are some kind of mere accoutrement, that autodestructive violence is an adjunct to demonism that you can take or leave as you please. The truth, however, is that my wounds constitute the most reliable proof of my accomplishments, for a trainee can acquire none of the necessary skills without enduring monumental suffering. The demonic potential of a given individual inheres first in his hatred of his own mundanity and second in the pitch of the violence he sustains in chasing that mundanity from his body. So far as I can tell, you have garnered to your name no accomplishments rooted in deeds noxious to the self. You are a stranger to elective anguish and no level of attainment in any subdomain of our craft can compensate for this particular shortfall. True embrace of the left hand path means flinging yourself voluntarily into the shredder of the training program, submitting your body to a long brutalization from which no part shall emerge unscathed. It means besting me in a race to discover the pain that you are least equipped to bear,’ I said. The occultist knelt before me and grovelled at my feet like some pederast before the mob, but the error of having fixed upon me such a queer and condescending look had already sealed his fate. Instead of killing him outright I confined him to an installation where he now spends all his hours being rolled flat feet first beneath a massive stone wheel. Every day at the stroke of noon the entirety of his upper digestive tract erupts like a prolapse from his screaming mouth and every day at sunset his brain-matter explodes onto the blackened flyblown floor. His fate is typical as only a small minority of trainees from the occult subtype are able to make the leap to an evil bereft of narcissism, to an understanding that the left hand path is not some childish treasure-hunt but rather an endless torment in which the body perpetually reforms itself around the task of inflicting harm.
sorry for such a long quote, but that’s what happens when every sentence is swollen with words like he's some diabolical proust and it’s difficult to tell, in a book of block-text unrelieved by paragraph breaks, when to cut it off. that passage i find very successful, even though ordinarily, i would call “too many notes” on it.
the breaking-down process isn’t all physical - it also involves isolating the individual from friends and family, although family may be doing itself in just fine on its own, The institution of the family is a damage-factory. It’s purpose is to ensure that only the very worst traits of the forebear are passed along to the child, each new generation thereby systematically divested of both the desire and the ability to improve.
there's also pain inflicted through nostalgia and loss and visions and oh, so many other ways:
I led him onward into a detailed mirage I’d crafted for this very occasion, a wide patch of floor that was lit from above as by a single downward-pointed spotlight. A long table stood athwart his path and as he approached it he saw that its surface was covered with all the treasures he had lost over the years. An inordinate number of the objects in question originated from back in his childhood, many so deeply buried in memory that but for the mishap of this late encounter he might never have thought of them again. Here lay the storybooks that had lulled him to sleep, favourite toys miraculously healed from states of irredressable breakage. The puppy that had died just weeks after entering his childhood home lay sleeping peacefully in a nest of blankets, calmly and factually restored from the death as through some brilliant form of forgetting. Other items on the table came from later phases of his life and these induced a more complex form of heartbreak for their status here was necessarily more strained, each having been treasures despite the certainty that they would eventually be lost.
there really is some beautiful writing here, and some descriptions that are going to stay with me, not all of them of the tooth-extraction/dismembered animal variety.
three stars because the style isn't my personal cuppa, but the guy sure can write.
”No wonder the world looked empty and blank, no wonder you saw no place within it for a creature as ignoble as yourself. By the onset of adolescence every mundane is a war-veteran and like every war-veteran he longs for a return of the peril in which he knew himself most alive. The adult is not the apotheosis but rather the wreckage of the child, the tall thin shadow of a toddler-king who reigns with the dawn at his back.
***********************************************
hoooooooo....
not...an easy read. i feel battered, and i'm going to need to sit with this a bit before i can sort out thoughts and feelings and all that.
come to my blog!
April 25, 2019
Pure, distilled nightmare, black-on-black. Though I find that it falls only by default into the category of horror. It's more like a toxic Bernhard rant that turns up the misanthropy and delirium until it pops out in Ligotti country.
Interesting side note: I'd wager that readers studying Left Hand traditions of the occult could have a very interesting debate about whether this constitutes a Balobian novel, as the writer, while he might not have sinister intent, seems to have created a sinister object. It really does read like some kind of harrowing received text...
Interesting side note: I'd wager that readers studying Left Hand traditions of the occult could have a very interesting debate about whether this constitutes a Balobian novel, as the writer, while he might not have sinister intent, seems to have created a sinister object. It really does read like some kind of harrowing received text...
April 23, 2019
la claque.
August 31, 2019
Jason’s writing is deeply personal, but not to himself. It’s the reader that feels like this book they are holding was always meant for them. You are left with a sense of the inevitable, and a strange, tickling sense of responsibility towards the protagonist, as if putting the book down is to abandon him to his fate. He can only escape by means of your reading his story. This put me strongly in mind of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, not in tone or style, but that same sense of dread and empathy. You cannot put down Mutilation Song without abandoning the protagonist to remain there forever, trapped in the liminal space between madness and demonic becoming.
Is Thomas mentally ill, or is he being groomed by a demonic entity, training to join their legion? The answer doesn’t matter. The book doesn’t even truly ask this question. What it asks instead is for you to join in on walking down the dark, dank paths to the train yard. To wait with Thomas, to stand witness, as he grapples with what’s real and what’s madness. How can we, the reader, help him know when it’s impossible to say for ourselves? Mutilation Song will leave you cast adrift with no answers, floating on a scummy surface of unease that will leave you to wonder who, or what, is creating what we call reality. Why were you, reader, chosen to pick up this book and walk this path? You won’t know, but you’ll feel certain that is was by design and not accident that the scales have fallen from your eyes.
Is Thomas mentally ill, or is he being groomed by a demonic entity, training to join their legion? The answer doesn’t matter. The book doesn’t even truly ask this question. What it asks instead is for you to join in on walking down the dark, dank paths to the train yard. To wait with Thomas, to stand witness, as he grapples with what’s real and what’s madness. How can we, the reader, help him know when it’s impossible to say for ourselves? Mutilation Song will leave you cast adrift with no answers, floating on a scummy surface of unease that will leave you to wonder who, or what, is creating what we call reality. Why were you, reader, chosen to pick up this book and walk this path? You won’t know, but you’ll feel certain that is was by design and not accident that the scales have fallen from your eyes.
September 2, 2023
Lautréamont renaît ?
Un monologue incroyablement perturbant, à ne pas lire en état dépressif. Un tourbillon qui nous emmène dans une noirceur totale.
Un monologue incroyablement perturbant, à ne pas lire en état dépressif. Un tourbillon qui nous emmène dans une noirceur totale.
July 12, 2021
“ I find myself once again confronting the stark fact that there do indeed exist men whose love is for the dark and the only things that can claim their attention are those that are fashioned from death. Seeing you at your worst has made me lonelier than you could possibly imagine because there’s been no way for me to speak about it without feeling your words in my mouth.” - Linnea
Wow. It was really difficult to rate this book at 5-stars mainly because it was disturbing to read and experience a person’s unfettered and undeterred descent into a complete, total, and utterly hopeless mental state. The complete loss of sanity via mental illness is documented here. Though fictional, it rings so true that it’s alarming.
If you make it through the first couple chapters - enough to turn away many readers of a weaker constitution - you will be reading first-hand something that maybe should not exist in writing.
The book churns forward in nausea-inducing upset from chilling to horrific to sad beyond words. As I say, if you can make it through the first couple chapters, you are rewarded with a beautiful work - a flower of demonic influence from the depths of hell, aka, complete mental illness.
One does not have to be spiritual to take away an understanding of what mental struggles look like. It is my opinion alone that the demon’s lies are completely equivalent to the lies of unmedicated (or maybe medicated) mental illness replete with the decline of one’s own hygiene; the alienation of one’s own family; the effects of a sick family member on the family less equipped to to handle it; and the destruction of hopes and dreams.
This is a look from the inside-out and is so accurate that it is sickening.
Wow. It was really difficult to rate this book at 5-stars mainly because it was disturbing to read and experience a person’s unfettered and undeterred descent into a complete, total, and utterly hopeless mental state. The complete loss of sanity via mental illness is documented here. Though fictional, it rings so true that it’s alarming.
If you make it through the first couple chapters - enough to turn away many readers of a weaker constitution - you will be reading first-hand something that maybe should not exist in writing.
The book churns forward in nausea-inducing upset from chilling to horrific to sad beyond words. As I say, if you can make it through the first couple chapters, you are rewarded with a beautiful work - a flower of demonic influence from the depths of hell, aka, complete mental illness.
One does not have to be spiritual to take away an understanding of what mental struggles look like. It is my opinion alone that the demon’s lies are completely equivalent to the lies of unmedicated (or maybe medicated) mental illness replete with the decline of one’s own hygiene; the alienation of one’s own family; the effects of a sick family member on the family less equipped to to handle it; and the destruction of hopes and dreams.
This is a look from the inside-out and is so accurate that it is sickening.
December 27, 2018
This ought to have been right up my alley but I really struggled to get through it. Each individual sentence is beautifully, and lyrically crafted but when taken as a whole the text is nearly impenetrable. There are single paragraphs that go on for two pages. I found it exhausting and I frequently caught myself falling asleep while reading. Consequently, I found it very difficult to parse or appreciate the narrative.
February 23, 2022
an exceptionally ugly book, impeccably written. while my reading tastes don't often skew quite this dark, i can handle it... and i willingly went where Jason Hrivnak wanted to take me. i feel like i got more insight into the schizophrenic mind from this novel than from any number of nonfiction works i've read in the past. please don't take my 5-star rating as an endorsement/recommendation, unless you know you have the constitution to appreciate this book.
January 7, 2021
This book is silly. Very very silly.
Sometimes there are well written verbose and indulgent sentences, that are mostly fluff, but sound nice enough.
And then the rest is silly. Very very silly. It makes evil, violence, and depression very silly. I think there is more insight into these topics on bad Cannibal Corpse albums than there is in this book.
It would've also been nice if he refrained from the constant "I did this" "I did that" "He did this" "He felt this" method of starting sentences. It's surprisingly amateurish in that aspect but I think it's primarily due to the choice of writing it in 1st person from the demon's point of view, which is coincidentally the literal worst option as a narrator in this story.
Sometimes there are well written verbose and indulgent sentences, that are mostly fluff, but sound nice enough.
And then the rest is silly. Very very silly. It makes evil, violence, and depression very silly. I think there is more insight into these topics on bad Cannibal Corpse albums than there is in this book.
It would've also been nice if he refrained from the constant "I did this" "I did that" "He did this" "He felt this" method of starting sentences. It's surprisingly amateurish in that aspect but I think it's primarily due to the choice of writing it in 1st person from the demon's point of view, which is coincidentally the literal worst option as a narrator in this story.
May 3, 2021
Explores the horrors of manic depression to their most extreme, but what is at first harrowing quickly becomes tiring, eventually eye rolling. Sitting somewhere between Brian Evenson and Blake Butler but lacking their tonal mastery and literary ambition respectively. There are some great sentences in here but that it’s all essentially a series of monologues gives a purple hue to the prose throughout. I admit I skimmed a bit, but not enough to notice at least 5 typos and weirdly aligned margins!
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January 21, 2024DNF'd at about 20%. It's good for what it is and I like the writing style, but it started getting tedious for me. I might have plowed through this a decade ago and appreciated it even if I didn't really enjoy it, but I'd need there to be more of a point to the running narrative Dinn than just cleverly devised sickness and degradation.
January 9, 2020
A great look into how mental health can affect a person.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews