Whew...yeah...what a read.

If you suffer from mental illness of any kind, do not read this book.

The Consumer brings a whole new meaning to the words "grotesque", "offensive", and "depressing". However, it is amazing well-written. It achieves its desired effect. ( )

dark and disturbing. ( )

Whew...yeah...what a read. If you suffer from mental illness of any kind, do not read this book.The Consumer brings a whole new meaning to the words "grotesque", "offensive", and "depressing". However, it is amazing well-written. It achieves its desired effect. ( )

In the tradition of Hubert Selby Jr, Henry Miller and Viennese action artist Hermann Nitsch, Michael Gira's collection of short stories, The Consumer,is a brutal, no holds barred, expressionistic collection of work that is at once, elegant, beautiful, and some of the darkest, most disturbing writing you will ever read. There is a place in art for the visceral and the confrontational, and just as the stark ugliness of Francis Bacon's paintings transcend their shocking qualities by virtue of the over reaching originality of language they share, the power of The Consumer is not in the impact of it's shocking subject manner, but in the lucid hypnotism of the purity in the writing. The voice in the text here is a stream of consciousness written in the blackest of black blood and unrelenting intensity. Not for the easily offended, but for the bolder reader, a brilliant dark language of the emotional internal experience of the eviscerating depths of the abyss. ( )

Gruesome ( )