Six f*cked up books you can buy people for Christmas
I like a little Halloween with my Christmas. A little Krampus. Some pagan shit. The best Christmas movie is Rare Exports and it’s not even a contest.
I usually try and buy people books they’ll like for Christmas. But what if you only know really messed up people? Or the messed-up people you know are the only ones who love books? Here’s my only list of 2019, a tip sheet for the tardy shoppers among us: six twisted books that will delight the most aberrant yuletide reveler.
1. The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht
This book that inspired the list. It’s a super grimy, Victorian gay love/horror story with a Jack the Ripper vibe — like Poe’s head on a greasy black spike, with lipstick applied. It has the grossest description I’ve ever read of how death smells, which includes the phrase “blood-logged ass”. Random pullquote from page 56: “He knelt in the sludge and pulled the calipers open.” Recite a passage at any family Christmas party to achieve maximum awkward discomfort; finish with a toast of bloody sherry.
2. Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson
Brian Evenson’s prose is like a blade that’s so sharp, you don’t feel yourself getting cut until your limb falls off. This is his new collection of stories. In the first one, which is only a page long, some men find a girl with no face, “a whole girl made of two half girls, but wrongly made, of two of the same halves.” Spoiler alert: they end up boarding her up in a shed. This all happens before page 3; there are 22 stories in the collection. Nightmares until the Epiphany!
3. Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias
On Twitter, Gabino Iglesias is like The Rock of literature: the perfect mix of profane and inspiring. His fiction is a garish mashup of border stories, blood, haywire politics, batshit Mexican Catholicism, drug crime, body horror, murder and peyote. A bunch of it is in Spanish — a blatant provocation to assholes. From page 56: “Her hechizos would shatter la frontera and poison the fish and make men and women lose their minds until the fire inside her had been extinguished.” Don’t mess with this book: it will shoot you.
4. McGlue by Otessa Moshfegh
Otessa Moshfegh is great at making people squirm. Like, wow: you can really make those words feel gross — as though they’re something you walk through, which leaves an icky film on your skin. McGlue is a novella about a drunk sailor in Massachusetts in 1851. Random pull from page 56: “Men’s voices pronounce instruction like the bleating cries from a herd of slaughtered goats.” Pair with this screaming goat doodad for a perfect Christmas duo:
5. Mooncalves by Victoria Hetherington
Victoria Hetherington’s debut novel is full of queasy sex and bodily fluids, but still manages to feel ethereal and unsettling in a metaphysical kind of way. There are Quebecois naturalist/sex cults and dystopian robot pets and a digital apocalypse (or “bright machine hell”) called The Merge. Someone eats a live pigeon. The whole thing would make a good Black Mirror movie, except you get the sense the producers might feel uneasy trying to adapt it. The book feels like its title: a, slippery, aberrant birth, but replayed as a hologram.
6. My book
My book is Different Beasts, a collection of twelve short stories about humans and monsters. Everybody tells me it’s dark. I think it’s pretty funny. There’s a story about a giant sheep demon and another one about a haunted piece of pork. Yes, one dog does see the unfortunate end of a wooden picket. But that story is sad, not funny. Anyway, don’t listen to me; Andrew F. Sullivan, who wrote a book called Waste, which opens with a guy getting his kneecap drilled, says that “In these uncanny stories, McConvey gently pulls at the seams of reality until it frays to reveal the battered heart beneath each tale.” The book is available here: https://gooselane.com/products/different-beasts.
Happy holidays to all.
