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Bedlam
"One of my favorite contemporary writers. Each of these vicious little stories is a perfect articulation of the madness of being a conscious entity. Elsby’s voice winds its way into your head and smashes about like a trapped heron."
—B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
"Elsby's easy tone and accessible prose conceals a complex malignant design. The naked mind speaks from an isolated place inside the cruelty of everyday power structures with flat affect, leaving the reader to sort out the relentless inequity, outrage, and pain. Bedlam is exactly the kind of brilliant and unapologetic trauma I crave."
—Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Convulsive
"In a series of scathing monologues, Bedlam is searching for an exit, craving for escape while stuck detailing the minutiae that keep us in place (the hairdos, the joggers, the dick pics, the doors, the death, the men...), as our new lives wait indefinitely—aging badly, somewhere in the near distance, before they’ve even begun."
—Gary J. Shipley, author of Terminal Park
"Elsby taps into the worst parts of ourselves and presents them as mundane grotesquery. The cruel things people do to one another daily are presented in a chilling, matter of fact way alongside passages of interiority that terrify because one might see them as a mirror. That's the true, wicked power of Bedlam."
—Anthony Dragonetti, author of Confidence Man
—B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space
"Elsby's easy tone and accessible prose conceals a complex malignant design. The naked mind speaks from an isolated place inside the cruelty of everyday power structures with flat affect, leaving the reader to sort out the relentless inequity, outrage, and pain. Bedlam is exactly the kind of brilliant and unapologetic trauma I crave."
—Joe Koch, author of The Wingspan of Severed Hands and Convulsive
"In a series of scathing monologues, Bedlam is searching for an exit, craving for escape while stuck detailing the minutiae that keep us in place (the hairdos, the joggers, the dick pics, the doors, the death, the men...), as our new lives wait indefinitely—aging badly, somewhere in the near distance, before they’ve even begun."
—Gary J. Shipley, author of Terminal Park
"Elsby taps into the worst parts of ourselves and presents them as mundane grotesquery. The cruel things people do to one another daily are presented in a chilling, matter of fact way alongside passages of interiority that terrify because one might see them as a mirror. That's the true, wicked power of Bedlam."
—Anthony Dragonetti, author of Confidence Man
132 pages, Paperback
First published April 11, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
June 26, 2023
Bedlam Review
A collection that simultaneously advances new thematic and stylistic ground while evolving the concerns of her novels, Elsby's Bedlam is both a vital addition to her growing oeuvre and a potential blueprint for where she may go next. The relationship between time, consciousness and mortality unite each of the stories and Elsby experiments with the articulations between all three, pursuing reason to the point of disintegration and pulling back just enough to record her findings. There is a grief and sadness in many of these stories that Elsby’s intellect pulls into itself, allowing the narrative voice to be reconfigured by the world it has dared contain.
Some Favourites:
‘Split Dick David Does A Dick Pic On A Tuesday’ represents the (current) apotheosis of Elsby’s “from the violent psycho’s point of view, and the psycho is also a smart lady who fucks” pov. It is a mordant, onyx black, comedy that allies a crystallised rage with a clinical intelligence to simultaneously dissect the logic of power dynamics, universality, and the male member’s place in culture. ‘If there’s a gender I identify with, it’s predator’
‘The Other Sides Of Doors’ with its qualifying, self interrogating narrator unfolds like Lispector channelling Poe.
‘DIEU SEUL: The Death Sentence’ is beautiful and life-stricken, occupying a lyricism that is both sorrowful and blazing.
‘Maybe all the dead need is a little warmth to get them by.
They didn’t die, they just got cold and stayed that way.’
‘On Whether Suicide Is A Reasonable Option, For Me, At his Time’ acts as both a scathing critique of the epistemological and ontological errors inherent in the capitalist, psychiatric response to mental illness and a meditation on the nature of time and mortality.
‘“Consider it an investment in yourself,” she said, like that makes money appear.’
Buy it.
A collection that simultaneously advances new thematic and stylistic ground while evolving the concerns of her novels, Elsby's Bedlam is both a vital addition to her growing oeuvre and a potential blueprint for where she may go next. The relationship between time, consciousness and mortality unite each of the stories and Elsby experiments with the articulations between all three, pursuing reason to the point of disintegration and pulling back just enough to record her findings. There is a grief and sadness in many of these stories that Elsby’s intellect pulls into itself, allowing the narrative voice to be reconfigured by the world it has dared contain.
Some Favourites:
‘Split Dick David Does A Dick Pic On A Tuesday’ represents the (current) apotheosis of Elsby’s “from the violent psycho’s point of view, and the psycho is also a smart lady who fucks” pov. It is a mordant, onyx black, comedy that allies a crystallised rage with a clinical intelligence to simultaneously dissect the logic of power dynamics, universality, and the male member’s place in culture. ‘If there’s a gender I identify with, it’s predator’
‘The Other Sides Of Doors’ with its qualifying, self interrogating narrator unfolds like Lispector channelling Poe.
‘DIEU SEUL: The Death Sentence’ is beautiful and life-stricken, occupying a lyricism that is both sorrowful and blazing.
‘Maybe all the dead need is a little warmth to get them by.
They didn’t die, they just got cold and stayed that way.’
‘On Whether Suicide Is A Reasonable Option, For Me, At his Time’ acts as both a scathing critique of the epistemological and ontological errors inherent in the capitalist, psychiatric response to mental illness and a meditation on the nature of time and mortality.
‘“Consider it an investment in yourself,” she said, like that makes money appear.’
Buy it.
May 20, 2023
This short book is an absolute masterpiece, I am obsessed, it was incredible, I loved the writing style its easy to read almost conversational as if your bestie is telling you a horrible story🤣, I devoured this in one sitting, I'm definitely going to pick up more of this authors work[check out Hexis too its amazing I read last year], there are fourteen short stories all told from the perspective of women, they feel more like internal monologues and the most disturbing part? the characters are relatable, theres a sense of unease throughout, the only way I can describe it is you feel safe but you know something is not quite right, I think the book explores mental illness and what it means to exist as a woman in the world, the existential dread and gloom clings to this book, this might sound dramtic but this book made me feel seen and heard, I resonated with some of the stories so much, I highly recommend this if you enjoy bleak stories that are sprinkled with wit and horror
April 9, 2023
Charlene Elsby sent me a signed ARC copy of this book (because she is incredible), and I had to read it right away.
Elsby is a dark magician with words. This collection of stories casts a spell that flips between making the reader an engaged psychologist, and a depleted victim, depending on the reader's mental state at the time. Although the stories are all different, they seemed to be connected through a narrator who has been bullied into apathy by her life's circumstances, mental illness, and the men surrounding her. Some of the responses to her mental bruises were extremely brutal, and others were cynically sarcastic enough to draw out a chuckle. Either way, it plucked emotions from me like pulling my teeth out with its hard writing and sense of despair that ran beneath everything like a silk scarf.
I want to draw attention to a quote from the story "Another Man's Bruises" that had me simultaneously laughing at my own tendency towards pareidolia (auditory or visual), and falling into a pit of existentialism about how nothing really matters or means anything:
"I would always soon give up and put my earphones in, lean my head against the window and listen for the music to tell me something I didn't know or had forgotten or needed to get by. This song came on about how she didn't know I was one of the people who'd hurt her, and I thought it meant something."
I also continued to return to the title "Bedlam" because so many of the stories pertain to situations that damaged the narrator through the use of a bed (literally and in the sense of sex in general), or situations where she has to go on the lam (running away from herself, her abusers, and existence). "Bedlam" also plays into the now-archaic meaning the word: an institution for the care of mentally ill people. The book is like a tiny institution in your hand that offers a window of observation into the narrator's experience.
Putting all of this together, this book hammers down on the senses and emotions until they ring like a bell inside of you. It made me angry at men, angry for myself as a woman, and angry at the brain's tendency to chemically imbalance. By the end of it, I was desperately clawing my way back out of the void that Elsby bewitched me into entering.
Elsby is a dark magician with words. This collection of stories casts a spell that flips between making the reader an engaged psychologist, and a depleted victim, depending on the reader's mental state at the time. Although the stories are all different, they seemed to be connected through a narrator who has been bullied into apathy by her life's circumstances, mental illness, and the men surrounding her. Some of the responses to her mental bruises were extremely brutal, and others were cynically sarcastic enough to draw out a chuckle. Either way, it plucked emotions from me like pulling my teeth out with its hard writing and sense of despair that ran beneath everything like a silk scarf.
I want to draw attention to a quote from the story "Another Man's Bruises" that had me simultaneously laughing at my own tendency towards pareidolia (auditory or visual), and falling into a pit of existentialism about how nothing really matters or means anything:
"I would always soon give up and put my earphones in, lean my head against the window and listen for the music to tell me something I didn't know or had forgotten or needed to get by. This song came on about how she didn't know I was one of the people who'd hurt her, and I thought it meant something."
I also continued to return to the title "Bedlam" because so many of the stories pertain to situations that damaged the narrator through the use of a bed (literally and in the sense of sex in general), or situations where she has to go on the lam (running away from herself, her abusers, and existence). "Bedlam" also plays into the now-archaic meaning the word: an institution for the care of mentally ill people. The book is like a tiny institution in your hand that offers a window of observation into the narrator's experience.
Putting all of this together, this book hammers down on the senses and emotions until they ring like a bell inside of you. It made me angry at men, angry for myself as a woman, and angry at the brain's tendency to chemically imbalance. By the end of it, I was desperately clawing my way back out of the void that Elsby bewitched me into entering.
July 3, 2023
Ruminations on the holes left behind by others. Elsby’s vignettes explore the maw of fresh wounds and the agony of absence in the wake of loss, betrayal, rejection, violation, and adoration. “The self as a disappearing act.” What’s revealed when the mask slips.
“Time isn’t obliterated as subjectivity expands into universality; finitude doesn’t turn to infinitude; desires don’t end because they’re met. There’s a place where time stops because it’s over; where the particulars don’t overcome, just dissipate, and the future doesn’t hold anything more…because the only thing that’s left to want is nothing.”
“Time isn’t obliterated as subjectivity expands into universality; finitude doesn’t turn to infinitude; desires don’t end because they’re met. There’s a place where time stops because it’s over; where the particulars don’t overcome, just dissipate, and the future doesn’t hold anything more…because the only thing that’s left to want is nothing.”
April 8, 2023
I can't think of an author more appropriate to a three day apocalyptic power outage than Charlene Elsby.
If you're familiar with her writing, you'll notice something happening in this short story collection. A sort of vulnerability, surfacing like a monster from under the sea. A cristalline pain that infects the aggressive thoughts and the hyperrationalization. This is an interesting turn of event for a writer so intensely solipsistic. I had many favorites, but I preferred the most heartbroken ones like Bad for the Baby, Fuck Stick, Dieu Seul: The Death Sentence, Rape Lines, Ridiculous and the two stories about suicide the the impossible names at the end.
I like most of what Charlene Elsby has done, but this might be might favorite material yet. It's her most accessible and heartfelt. Anyone who doesn't know where to start with her should definitely begin here.
If you're familiar with her writing, you'll notice something happening in this short story collection. A sort of vulnerability, surfacing like a monster from under the sea. A cristalline pain that infects the aggressive thoughts and the hyperrationalization. This is an interesting turn of event for a writer so intensely solipsistic. I had many favorites, but I preferred the most heartbroken ones like Bad for the Baby, Fuck Stick, Dieu Seul: The Death Sentence, Rape Lines, Ridiculous and the two stories about suicide the the impossible names at the end.
I like most of what Charlene Elsby has done, but this might be might favorite material yet. It's her most accessible and heartfelt. Anyone who doesn't know where to start with her should definitely begin here.
September 18, 2023
A house on fire with many rooms. In prose as clear and sharp as broken glass, Charlene Elsby pirouettes through a delipidated hallway and describes the furniture of every melted room in Bedlam, the revolting minutiae of inner worlds we find ourselves locked in every day. Consciousness like a trapdoor into another skull. Characters navigate dick pics, trauma, intrusive thoughts of suicide. With deadpan humour, Elsby finds moments of horror and release throughout. Genital mutilation. Pink handfuls of zopiclone. Makeup painted across the sinewy map of a face. The wallpaper is peeling. The house is like a fever. There are so many of us here.
April 30, 2023
Welcome to the Depravity section of my library.
These stories are honest and brutal, they go where you think they'll go but where you don't believe anyone will take you.
Let's follow a stream of consciousness into the worst decisions and justify our actions all along the way. Let's suffer truths that we'd rather forget or never admit to anyone.
Welcome to the likes of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Pahlaniuk and Chandler Morrison and Nick Cave, with these bite-sized short stories that pack a punch.
Let's be honest, it's what we're all thinking.
These stories are honest and brutal, they go where you think they'll go but where you don't believe anyone will take you.
Let's follow a stream of consciousness into the worst decisions and justify our actions all along the way. Let's suffer truths that we'd rather forget or never admit to anyone.
Welcome to the likes of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Pahlaniuk and Chandler Morrison and Nick Cave, with these bite-sized short stories that pack a punch.
Let's be honest, it's what we're all thinking.
May 31, 2023
I was afraid to read this book. I received an ARC from Charlene, and when I noticed it showing up in other people’s feeds, one had mentioned that people with delicate mental health issues surrounding depression may want to avoid reading. That’s me, but I’m way too big of a Charlene Elsby fan to avoid. Happy to say I’m still here and these stories were really good, reaching into and pulling out some of the darkest parts of the human mind. Bravo.
June 7, 2024
Beautiful little collection.
My favourites were Counterexample (The Jogger), Split Dick David, Dieu Seul, So Many of Them, and On Whether Suicide Is A Reasonable Option (I was pretty certain it would be a favourite when I first read the title).
My favourites were Counterexample (The Jogger), Split Dick David, Dieu Seul, So Many of Them, and On Whether Suicide Is A Reasonable Option (I was pretty certain it would be a favourite when I first read the title).
April 26, 2023
There is a vicious honesty to the internal voice telling these brutal stories that is far too recognizable as the one you hear in your head everyday, whether you admit it or not. Elsby taps into something very dark and true in Bedlam.
April 12, 2023
A DIFFERENT TYPE OF ADULT
Bedlam. Charlene Elsby. Apocalypse Party, 2023. 131 pages.
I’m always fascinated with the ways that concepts such as genre can be perturbed and subverted. Genre fiction needs to have certain characteristics to make it easier to group with other fiction, easier to sort. It’s kind of an unavoidable laziness or path of least resistance to say that all horror fiction should be scary or should deal with supernatural themes or have similar “grouping tendencies” so that prospective buyers can know what they’re in for should they put their money down when getting a book.
Book reviewers are part of this machinery, to pretty much everybody’s displeasure. If I were to tell you that Charlene Elsby’s short story collection Bedlam was “psychological horror,” it wouldn’t really be adequately doing the descriptive job and would leave crucial information unexplained. The sites of action in these fourteen stories are locked firmly into the hermetic company of first-person narrators (as far as I could tell) whose goals seem to be in unearthing aspects of human psychology that are, to put it mildly, horrifying. Horripilating could be another term, defined as undergoing “horripilation” in which the hairs stand erect from the body due to cold, fear, or excitement. These are not calming stories. Neither are they in particular stories where a formal payoff is given that might mark them as “genre fiction.” The payoff is not narrative but the sort of thing you get from peering into a box at something you really shouldn’t want to get an eyeful of.
Right away I want to give the disclaimer that I am not fluent enough in the lingo of philosophy to talk about some underlying features of Elsby’s fiction here. I have gathered elsewhere that she has a doctorate in philosophy and has been a philosophy professor at times. Some of the narration in the stories bears the traces of this kind of argumentation and mental flow. I’ll bet you that if you were up on your philosophical terminology and schools of thought the stories might mean something special to you in this regard. As it was, with me, the stories were like the chattering products of a powerful mind that cannot rest, cannot come to a kind of peaceful end point. I don’t need to know philosophy to take insight and enjoyment from Elsby’s reports from a unique, sometimes darkly humorous, and often harrowing place on what life means. Elsby’s narrators, those inescapable women (they always seemed to be clearly female to me), are of a different type of adult than you, more psychologically alien and yet wearing the face — surface — of the person on the other side of the boardroom table in your workplace, dancing at the bar, getting her hair cut at the salon. This other type of adult observes things from a bleak, fearful vantage point. The fiction seems to be a kind of warning that if you were to finally be able to peer into the thoughts of the people around you, driving in traffic, waiting in line at the supermarket, etc, you would be blown away by the frightening noise you would discover there.
But, and this is a crucial point, Elsby’s speakers are not necessarily others. There’s enough in common with you that it’s not science fiction, these aren’t true aliens. We all have romantic disappointments that leave us wounded and trying to establish what exactly happened, how much the problems originated within us (see “Another Man’s Bruises,” “Bad For The Baby,” other stories). The typical dating profiles of the narrators in Elsby’s stories would be a set of terrifying documents, but it’s nothing we aren’t familiar with in certain generic ways from our own lives. Elsby, like a tour guide leading timid civilians on a social safari, just as easily transgresses into anti socially violent places. Going out of your typical drive to hit a midnight jogger seems like a rational decision. Sending an offensive picture to the wrong lady on the wrong day could result in your damn near human sacrifice; in “Split Dick David Does a Dick Pic on a Tuesday” we see the terrifying but all-too orderly logic of female vengeance enacted against the photographed phallus of a man, who will mistakenly try to argue his way out of being targeted for such stomach-turning, gory retribution since other men have taken actions just as bad:
“Because of his limited experience, he doesn’t know what it’s like to take on the characteristics of a set. Of course, the women are all quite experienced in this. We have to pay for what some other woman has done. More likely, we have to pay for what all women are perceived to have done. In actuality, we’re all paying for everything that every other woman has done to some man, because he can’t differentiate between us well enough to figure out that I’m neither his ex-girlfriend nor his mom…The point is, the I’m not the worst man to live argument isn’t going to work with me, because here in reality we embody the universals in which we participate, and while you can not all men me all you like, you have to recognize that some men is enough, and that what matters now is that you’re the man in imminent danger, because I have decided that’s how it’s going to be.”
Reading the collection Bedlam in one sitting means that the discomfort level will not let up, but because there are fourteen stories, discomfort will take on one of fourteen more or less distinct angles, and it’s a kaleidoscope of fear loaded with fourteen different bits of darkly colored glass tumbling into different configurations. One story “So Many of Them,” a childhood reminiscence of owning an aquarium full of multiplying mice, was particularly skin-crawling which is no small statement given the rest of the book’s offerings.
Bedlam is a volume for readers daring to eavesdrop on one of the most unsettling voices in indie lit as it verbally marks out the dimensions of its inescapable existential cage — perhaps to commiserate? is there hope enough for that? are we locked in too? There’s value in plumbing the depths and measuring the dark unexplored recesses of the mind, and that’s the often unpleasant task we turn to writers to do. I don’t know if it’s a sign of our times, of our nation, of how nervous systems diverge, what is the explanation, but a writer like Elsby could, with her descriptive powers, conceivably help the rest of us by providing us with illustrations of what she sees as she gazes down from an arrow slit onto the landscape of consciousness’s futility.
June 14, 2023
If there were ever a more appropriate title for this collection, I don’t know what it is. Each story in these pages is laced with enough quiet, everyday insanity and pain to last a lifetime. There’s nothing supernatural here, just common, real life pain to make this one sting. Recommended.
May 14, 2025
"The responsible thing to do would be to take myself out of society, put myself somewhere where the damage would be contained. A quarantine. Hurt people hurt people but not me, I'd only talk to people who wouldn't love me, only spend time with those who wouldn't care. If someone started to feel a way about me, I'd leave. I'd ghost them, and while they might think that was a cruel thing to do. I'd know better that every single other thing I could do would be worse. They shouldn't have cared in the first place."
It's kind of really bloody disgusting how plain, how mundane, how pedestrian Elsby makes the very worst parts of ourselves appear. It's sickening, in a way, how the most sinful acts of humanity are just smeared across these pages in some stinking, festering, pulpy normalcy. There's something so horrendously regular about Bedlam, and that's why it's so harrowing - it scrutinizes the banality of human cruelty, and in its exploration it's scathing. There's an addictive yet deeply unpleasant quality to this book, like an ice-pick scratching at your brain, it's horrible and distressing, and you'd imagine that no-one would willingly sign up for this specific brand of literary torture, yet reading Bedlam felt like a eureka moment, it felt like everything finally fell into place.
There's such an intensive vulnerability to this book, and I believe that the answer to why we enjoy suffering through literature lies in books such as Bedlam. Deep wells of isolation and sadness run through these stories, excessive amounts of grief and loss burden each tale, it's so bleak and so hopeless and so wonderful. Facing down such levels of authenticity and honesty is not all that usual in books, it may come up fairly often in my reviews but, that's down to me seeking out this specific kind of literature. Bedlam felt intimate and personal, it felt viscerally angry, almost like a savage critique of the world we live in and its response to mental hardships and anguish. It's a short book, and it's all over far too fast, it's a contradictory sort of thing, dramatic to explain yet easy to experience.
It's really impossible to say what the most disturbing part of Bedlam actually is, perhaps the way that these stories felt like far too relatable private thoughts, maybe the conversational style that made it feel more like a confession than a novel, or the cloying sense of unease that lingers throughout, is it the fact that this feels like an existential crisis in print form? Honestly, who even knows, either way, it's fucking magical. Everything in Bedlam is wrong, and off-kilter and awful. Bedlam is brilliant, it's all musings on lives ruined by the horror that is others, ruminations on the agony that is abandonment, it's meditations on betrayal, and it's one of the reasons that Elsby is one of my favorite contemporary writers of this generation.
"He liked to leave marks and had sharp little teeth that got everywhere, and that kind of pain I didn't like so much. It was too much, too condensed, and he'd do it where he thought people could see and would know. But then when I told him to hit me proper, all of a sudden we had to close the blinds, because he didn't want the neighbor with his blinds open to think that he was that kind of man, who'd do such a thing."
It's kind of really bloody disgusting how plain, how mundane, how pedestrian Elsby makes the very worst parts of ourselves appear. It's sickening, in a way, how the most sinful acts of humanity are just smeared across these pages in some stinking, festering, pulpy normalcy. There's something so horrendously regular about Bedlam, and that's why it's so harrowing - it scrutinizes the banality of human cruelty, and in its exploration it's scathing. There's an addictive yet deeply unpleasant quality to this book, like an ice-pick scratching at your brain, it's horrible and distressing, and you'd imagine that no-one would willingly sign up for this specific brand of literary torture, yet reading Bedlam felt like a eureka moment, it felt like everything finally fell into place.
There's such an intensive vulnerability to this book, and I believe that the answer to why we enjoy suffering through literature lies in books such as Bedlam. Deep wells of isolation and sadness run through these stories, excessive amounts of grief and loss burden each tale, it's so bleak and so hopeless and so wonderful. Facing down such levels of authenticity and honesty is not all that usual in books, it may come up fairly often in my reviews but, that's down to me seeking out this specific kind of literature. Bedlam felt intimate and personal, it felt viscerally angry, almost like a savage critique of the world we live in and its response to mental hardships and anguish. It's a short book, and it's all over far too fast, it's a contradictory sort of thing, dramatic to explain yet easy to experience.
"Not everything people want is something that they do, but maybe everything that someone does is something that they wanted. People start to make comments. They tell you their own stories about train tracks, about bridges and buildings. The knives, the guns, the helium tanks. How they're still not sure they did the right thing. Some promises once filled, you can't break. And you have to reassure them that you're alive and plan to be tomorrow. Because it's polite. Because it's not on them. Because I love him and don't want to hurt him."
It's really impossible to say what the most disturbing part of Bedlam actually is, perhaps the way that these stories felt like far too relatable private thoughts, maybe the conversational style that made it feel more like a confession than a novel, or the cloying sense of unease that lingers throughout, is it the fact that this feels like an existential crisis in print form? Honestly, who even knows, either way, it's fucking magical. Everything in Bedlam is wrong, and off-kilter and awful. Bedlam is brilliant, it's all musings on lives ruined by the horror that is others, ruminations on the agony that is abandonment, it's meditations on betrayal, and it's one of the reasons that Elsby is one of my favorite contemporary writers of this generation.
"He liked to leave marks and had sharp little teeth that got everywhere, and that kind of pain I didn't like so much. It was too much, too condensed, and he'd do it where he thought people could see and would know. But then when I told him to hit me proper, all of a sudden we had to close the blinds, because he didn't want the neighbor with his blinds open to think that he was that kind of man, who'd do such a thing."
August 31, 2024
Very special book. Read it in a day, it pulled me in so quick. It’s so sick and sadistic, so beautiful and real. It feels like something you’re not allowed to be saying or reading, voyeurism into someone else’s intrusive thoughts, mixed with hyperreal, bizarre fictive scenarios. Would recommended.
Trigger warnings for sexual assault and suicide, very graphic at times
Trigger warnings for sexual assault and suicide, very graphic at times
January 7, 2024
Wonderfully weird and philosophical.
September 1, 2023
Reading Charlene Elsby makes me feel bad. But in a good way, I think. Or, at least, a constructive one; a necessary one. One might describe her work as Pyrrhically militant feminism, which is to say that she writes with a reckless disregard for her reader’s safety, or her own. If her previous novels Hexis and Psychros took the form of philosophical MMA bouts—lone agents grappling with specific male tormentors through the bloody pulp of trauma—then Bedlam is an all-out brawl. This is Jen Yu in the teahouse shit. The Bride vs. The Crazy 88. She might be going down, but she’s taking every last one of these motherfuckers with her.
“Bad for the Baby” throws the first punch—an acid-tongued inner monologue (the format for all these stories, and one which admirers of Elsby’s work will immediately recognize) from a woman quietly tying herself in knots over the class dynamics at play between herself and the pregnant woman cutting her hair, before spinning out into bad memories of a bad man and all the other tiny thousand cuts that led her to this day, this moment, where she sits crying in a barber chair. For the uninitiated, “Bad for the Baby” is a near-perfect intro to what Elsby does so well—drawing you in with a dark joke and a conspiratorial smirk, only to grab you by the shoulders the second you get close—digging in and shaking you until she’s made it abundantly clear that she’s not joking at all. That she’s as serious as your fucking life.
And if the first few stories don’t convince you, “Split Dick David Does a Dick Pic on a Tuesday” ought to do the trick.
I crossed my legs without thinking as I began writing about this—the reflexive muscle-memory of penile self-defense. A fusillade from a much more focused and vengeful mind, “Split Dick David” is a masterclass in pelvic tension-building (live readings would almost certainly lead to audience fainting spells a la Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts”), and you don’t have to be named David to feel its razorwire fury (though it definitely helps). Hand to god, the first thing I did after I finished reading was get up and make sure my doors were locked.
Now for the record, I’ve never sent an unsolicited dick pic, but even as a relative innocent I couldn’t help but feel the weight of complicity as Elsby ticked down her dicksposition matrix of possible responses, ranging from the humiliating (forwarding it to his mom), to the life-wrecking (hanging up fliers), to the increasingly gruesome (let’s just say there’s more than one way to skin a cock). By the end, it feels categorically insane that anyone ever does this—just puts their junk out into the ether willy-nilly (heh)—but it’s perhaps that very insanity that Elsby is driving at.
Existing power structures being what they are, errant nudes simply aren’t dangerous for men the way they are for women. We don’t have to think about the consequences, because by and large, there aren’t any. They’re a power move all their own—the sexual equivalent of “haha, not touching you, can’t get mad.” In this way, despite its extreme-gore specificity, “Split Dick David” also functions more broadly as fierce polemic against the whole of male privilege—an uncompromising demand that men step outside the phallic ivory towers of our own experience and really think about how it might feel to be bombarded daily by invasive, importunate genitalia. And then to cut it the fuck out (before she does it for us).
If you make it through “Split Dick David” intact, you’ll be promptly met by the left hook of “Here in a Place I Shouldn’t Be”—a despairing requiem for potentially healthy love, and the grief inherent in leaving a kind partner for their own good—followed immediately by the dehumanizing body blows of “Fuck Stick”—a nauseating, dysphemistic account of sexual assault. Survive that punishing combo, and you’ll find yourself staggering punch-drunk into a 10th round haymaker.
“Rape Lines” is a vehement demystification. An unprecedented smashing of convention. A conversation obliterator. It thrusts the reader into a woman’s mind, mid-rape, and from there spools out an autodidact’s checklist against the banality of evil. In between mulling her options (fight or flight? rigid or limp? brevity or dignity?), and reviewing her healthcare needs (is she current on birth control? protected from STD’s? where’s the nearest pharmacy?) she worries about her mattress (can the springs take this weight?) and hypoallergenic pillowcases (will this blood wash out?), reflects on other times she was raped (when did this start? which times really count? why does it keep happening?), and even wryly muses on her own luck with regard to its degree and frequency (“why couldn’t I just get raped a little?” “Did I have a rapethefuckoutofme vibe?”).
The overall effect, while obviously horrifying, is much more one of inconvenience, and an almost mordant, “here we go again” ennui. For all its graphic physical violence, “Rape Lines” seems intent on depicting rape not as some be-all end-all destructive act, but rather just an absurdly, and even tediously common crime. Case in point, before it’s even over, this woman has already fully emasculated her attacker in her mind, disabused herself of any nagging notions about seeking justice, and plotted out her routine recovery. She’ll take some time off. She’ll get herself a cake. She’ll binge a show. “Call it self-care.” The familiar efficiency of it all is devastating, but one again suspects Elsby is squaring up against a larger point. Namely, the way we talk about rape. The way we both over- and understate its importance, sometimes in the same breath, and virtually never for the right reasons. The way even typing it right now is sending warning signals down my phalanges like “Are you sure you want to use that word?” and “It makes people uncomfortable.” and “Would maybe something a little gentler do? They’ll know what you mean.” The way we fetishize “purity” and hyperbolize its loss. The way we defend women’s “honor” at the expense of showing them true respect. The way we crave all the salacious details but protect ourselves from the ugly ones. The way we thrust both blame and victimhood upon survivors to distance ourselves from their fates. And the way we put so much on one word—Rape—that it becomes almost impossible to talk meaningfully about it at all (and most definitely contributes to its being vastly underreported). All of this is a huge part of the problem.
I wish I could reprint the entire paragraph in which Elsby’s character bemoans how she’s always getting “full-blown rape[d]” as opposed to “semi-raped”—“Like the women who […] don’t really want to have sex, but do it anyway, to be polite.” It’s maybe the boldest, most provocative moment in the whole book. The acknowledgement that there are different kinds of rape, and that lumping them all together under the same powerloaded term is arguably counterproductive, is not a popular or even traditionally feminist one. Date rape is still rape. Grey rape is still rape. Not stopping when someone says “stop” during consensual sex is still fucking rape. No means no. And yet, post-#MeToo America has been working out its own sliding scale of douchebaggery for a while now, and we seem to agree that, say, R. Kelly and Louis CK are not the same level of bad (an exercise which immediately bears the dangerous fruit of giving some predators more of a pass than others). So where does that leave us? How do we codify all these nuances without inadvertently lessening their import? How do we discuss the harm without stigmatizing the harmed? How do we hold within our scared, muddled, defensive, combative, and sociobiologically limited worldviews that two things are quite likely true: 1.) That rape can ruin lives, and 2.) that it doesn’t have to. That it doesn’t define anyone by default. And that, despite our collective freighting of women’s sexuality with eons of puritanical, paternalistic baggage, sometimes, it’s just a really bad night, and laughing about it, or crying about it, or reporting it, or having some cake and quietly moving on from it, are all understandable and legitimate responses. That it is only for each individual woman to say.
I don’t claim to have the answers here. I’m honestly nervous as hell just asking the questions. But I know they’re important. And I believe that work like “Rape Lines” is invaluable to the conversation. It reminds us, with a weary sigh, that the best things we can do are listen to survivors on their own terms, try to ease their burdens in the ways that they want, and concede that there is no catchall answer to any of this; that this conversation will never be over; that we can always do better.
And just in case that wasn’t enough heavy psychic lifting for you, allow me to put a bow on this beast via the book’s penultimate entry. “On Whether Suicide is a Reasonable Option, For Me, At This Time” marks the only story in Bedlam in which Elsby is unequivocally writing as herself, detailing her struggles with depression, her travails with various neuroleptic medications, her exhaustion with all the cruel forces that compel her again and again to pick up her sword and write, and of course, her thoughts on the titular act, never too far out of mind with all its tantalizing promise of quiet and still. This is the final girl still standing—the action heroine alluded to in the opening paragraph, bruised, torn, breathing hard and a pint low, but surrounded on all sides by the bodies of enemies rent asunder. Her righteous work, at least for now, is done, and the book’s enigmatic coda “Time To Go” seems to suggest that, given a chance to heal, she’ll be back to fight another day.
This is the fourth book I’ve reviewed by Charlene Elsby, and while each of its predecessors was harrowing in its own way, Bedlam cuts deeper still for its seething realism. Whatever minor, metaphorical comforts she employed to soften the (still brutal) blows of those previous works have largely been set aside here. These stories vomit and cackle and bleed and scream with a degree of experiential pain that it’s hard to imagine anyone conjuring out of whole cloth. A lot of them hurt to read, and they’re supposed to. And it’s through this steely brand of blacked-out, metaphysical autofiction that she continually hurls herself pell-mell into all the things she wishes were different but does not expect to live to see changed. Indeed, Elsby has always written with this kind of suicide bomber abandon—like any book could be her last—but thankfully, we already know this one is not. She’s still out there, fighting the good fight, and we need her now more than ever.
“Bad for the Baby” throws the first punch—an acid-tongued inner monologue (the format for all these stories, and one which admirers of Elsby’s work will immediately recognize) from a woman quietly tying herself in knots over the class dynamics at play between herself and the pregnant woman cutting her hair, before spinning out into bad memories of a bad man and all the other tiny thousand cuts that led her to this day, this moment, where she sits crying in a barber chair. For the uninitiated, “Bad for the Baby” is a near-perfect intro to what Elsby does so well—drawing you in with a dark joke and a conspiratorial smirk, only to grab you by the shoulders the second you get close—digging in and shaking you until she’s made it abundantly clear that she’s not joking at all. That she’s as serious as your fucking life.
And if the first few stories don’t convince you, “Split Dick David Does a Dick Pic on a Tuesday” ought to do the trick.
I crossed my legs without thinking as I began writing about this—the reflexive muscle-memory of penile self-defense. A fusillade from a much more focused and vengeful mind, “Split Dick David” is a masterclass in pelvic tension-building (live readings would almost certainly lead to audience fainting spells a la Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts”), and you don’t have to be named David to feel its razorwire fury (though it definitely helps). Hand to god, the first thing I did after I finished reading was get up and make sure my doors were locked.
Now for the record, I’ve never sent an unsolicited dick pic, but even as a relative innocent I couldn’t help but feel the weight of complicity as Elsby ticked down her dicksposition matrix of possible responses, ranging from the humiliating (forwarding it to his mom), to the life-wrecking (hanging up fliers), to the increasingly gruesome (let’s just say there’s more than one way to skin a cock). By the end, it feels categorically insane that anyone ever does this—just puts their junk out into the ether willy-nilly (heh)—but it’s perhaps that very insanity that Elsby is driving at.
Existing power structures being what they are, errant nudes simply aren’t dangerous for men the way they are for women. We don’t have to think about the consequences, because by and large, there aren’t any. They’re a power move all their own—the sexual equivalent of “haha, not touching you, can’t get mad.” In this way, despite its extreme-gore specificity, “Split Dick David” also functions more broadly as fierce polemic against the whole of male privilege—an uncompromising demand that men step outside the phallic ivory towers of our own experience and really think about how it might feel to be bombarded daily by invasive, importunate genitalia. And then to cut it the fuck out (before she does it for us).
If you make it through “Split Dick David” intact, you’ll be promptly met by the left hook of “Here in a Place I Shouldn’t Be”—a despairing requiem for potentially healthy love, and the grief inherent in leaving a kind partner for their own good—followed immediately by the dehumanizing body blows of “Fuck Stick”—a nauseating, dysphemistic account of sexual assault. Survive that punishing combo, and you’ll find yourself staggering punch-drunk into a 10th round haymaker.
“Rape Lines” is a vehement demystification. An unprecedented smashing of convention. A conversation obliterator. It thrusts the reader into a woman’s mind, mid-rape, and from there spools out an autodidact’s checklist against the banality of evil. In between mulling her options (fight or flight? rigid or limp? brevity or dignity?), and reviewing her healthcare needs (is she current on birth control? protected from STD’s? where’s the nearest pharmacy?) she worries about her mattress (can the springs take this weight?) and hypoallergenic pillowcases (will this blood wash out?), reflects on other times she was raped (when did this start? which times really count? why does it keep happening?), and even wryly muses on her own luck with regard to its degree and frequency (“why couldn’t I just get raped a little?” “Did I have a rapethefuckoutofme vibe?”).
The overall effect, while obviously horrifying, is much more one of inconvenience, and an almost mordant, “here we go again” ennui. For all its graphic physical violence, “Rape Lines” seems intent on depicting rape not as some be-all end-all destructive act, but rather just an absurdly, and even tediously common crime. Case in point, before it’s even over, this woman has already fully emasculated her attacker in her mind, disabused herself of any nagging notions about seeking justice, and plotted out her routine recovery. She’ll take some time off. She’ll get herself a cake. She’ll binge a show. “Call it self-care.” The familiar efficiency of it all is devastating, but one again suspects Elsby is squaring up against a larger point. Namely, the way we talk about rape. The way we both over- and understate its importance, sometimes in the same breath, and virtually never for the right reasons. The way even typing it right now is sending warning signals down my phalanges like “Are you sure you want to use that word?” and “It makes people uncomfortable.” and “Would maybe something a little gentler do? They’ll know what you mean.” The way we fetishize “purity” and hyperbolize its loss. The way we defend women’s “honor” at the expense of showing them true respect. The way we crave all the salacious details but protect ourselves from the ugly ones. The way we thrust both blame and victimhood upon survivors to distance ourselves from their fates. And the way we put so much on one word—Rape—that it becomes almost impossible to talk meaningfully about it at all (and most definitely contributes to its being vastly underreported). All of this is a huge part of the problem.
I wish I could reprint the entire paragraph in which Elsby’s character bemoans how she’s always getting “full-blown rape[d]” as opposed to “semi-raped”—“Like the women who […] don’t really want to have sex, but do it anyway, to be polite.” It’s maybe the boldest, most provocative moment in the whole book. The acknowledgement that there are different kinds of rape, and that lumping them all together under the same powerloaded term is arguably counterproductive, is not a popular or even traditionally feminist one. Date rape is still rape. Grey rape is still rape. Not stopping when someone says “stop” during consensual sex is still fucking rape. No means no. And yet, post-#MeToo America has been working out its own sliding scale of douchebaggery for a while now, and we seem to agree that, say, R. Kelly and Louis CK are not the same level of bad (an exercise which immediately bears the dangerous fruit of giving some predators more of a pass than others). So where does that leave us? How do we codify all these nuances without inadvertently lessening their import? How do we discuss the harm without stigmatizing the harmed? How do we hold within our scared, muddled, defensive, combative, and sociobiologically limited worldviews that two things are quite likely true: 1.) That rape can ruin lives, and 2.) that it doesn’t have to. That it doesn’t define anyone by default. And that, despite our collective freighting of women’s sexuality with eons of puritanical, paternalistic baggage, sometimes, it’s just a really bad night, and laughing about it, or crying about it, or reporting it, or having some cake and quietly moving on from it, are all understandable and legitimate responses. That it is only for each individual woman to say.
I don’t claim to have the answers here. I’m honestly nervous as hell just asking the questions. But I know they’re important. And I believe that work like “Rape Lines” is invaluable to the conversation. It reminds us, with a weary sigh, that the best things we can do are listen to survivors on their own terms, try to ease their burdens in the ways that they want, and concede that there is no catchall answer to any of this; that this conversation will never be over; that we can always do better.
And just in case that wasn’t enough heavy psychic lifting for you, allow me to put a bow on this beast via the book’s penultimate entry. “On Whether Suicide is a Reasonable Option, For Me, At This Time” marks the only story in Bedlam in which Elsby is unequivocally writing as herself, detailing her struggles with depression, her travails with various neuroleptic medications, her exhaustion with all the cruel forces that compel her again and again to pick up her sword and write, and of course, her thoughts on the titular act, never too far out of mind with all its tantalizing promise of quiet and still. This is the final girl still standing—the action heroine alluded to in the opening paragraph, bruised, torn, breathing hard and a pint low, but surrounded on all sides by the bodies of enemies rent asunder. Her righteous work, at least for now, is done, and the book’s enigmatic coda “Time To Go” seems to suggest that, given a chance to heal, she’ll be back to fight another day.
This is the fourth book I’ve reviewed by Charlene Elsby, and while each of its predecessors was harrowing in its own way, Bedlam cuts deeper still for its seething realism. Whatever minor, metaphorical comforts she employed to soften the (still brutal) blows of those previous works have largely been set aside here. These stories vomit and cackle and bleed and scream with a degree of experiential pain that it’s hard to imagine anyone conjuring out of whole cloth. A lot of them hurt to read, and they’re supposed to. And it’s through this steely brand of blacked-out, metaphysical autofiction that she continually hurls herself pell-mell into all the things she wishes were different but does not expect to live to see changed. Indeed, Elsby has always written with this kind of suicide bomber abandon—like any book could be her last—but thankfully, we already know this one is not. She’s still out there, fighting the good fight, and we need her now more than ever.
January 3, 2025
I bought Charlene’s “Bedlam” in sort of a blind buy situation. Their work was recommended on this app under some other writers I follow and adore and I thought - fuck it - let’s go.
What I found was less the “weird horror” of these other writers I follow, instead replaced with a different horror that strikes deeper. The horror of suicide. Of rape. Of loss. Real terror that actually keeps you up at night.
My usual cup of tea? No. Was some of it not super relatable? Yes. But that didn’t stop me from appreciating the author’s power and control over voice and painting a picture more terrifying (in many of the stories) than many of the other recommendations you’ll see on Good Reads.
Looking forward to exploring more of Charlene’s work.
What I found was less the “weird horror” of these other writers I follow, instead replaced with a different horror that strikes deeper. The horror of suicide. Of rape. Of loss. Real terror that actually keeps you up at night.
My usual cup of tea? No. Was some of it not super relatable? Yes. But that didn’t stop me from appreciating the author’s power and control over voice and painting a picture more terrifying (in many of the stories) than many of the other recommendations you’ll see on Good Reads.
Looking forward to exploring more of Charlene’s work.
January 15, 2024
My favorite thing is when an artist can harness the power of the simplicity. Charlene has a beautiful way making you see the potential rage and horror behind the most mundane acts and thoughts, as well as making the most horrific-violent acts seem routine. These stories are incredibly powerful. Another Man’s Bruises, Disgusting, and Here in a Place I Shouldn’t Be tore at my soul. If a short story could be my spirit animal, I would chose Time to Go…just blissful.
April 29, 2025
This is a collection of short stories as much as it is a collection of bruises, physical and psychical. Charlene Elsby's characters here are abused, dejected, weary and detached. There are episodes of trenchant pain and delicious petty angst. As always, Elsby's writing is clear and digestible, showcasing a sharp intellect with little pretension.
June 20, 2025
Bedlam. Noun. Definition, "A place appropriated to the confinement and care of the insane; a madhouse". An apt name, for Elby's collection drips with trauma, abuse, neurosis, and the worst of our intrusive thoughts realized. Dark thoughts and situations scrutinized under an impassive lense. Not for those who read for escape.
April 21, 2023
This collection is hard-core, no holds barred, and wonderful.
I was already apprehensive of Charlene Elsby, after engaging with her other works (buy them all) and am now truly scared of her.
I am grateful for this.
Long live the queen!
I was already apprehensive of Charlene Elsby, after engaging with her other works (buy them all) and am now truly scared of her.
I am grateful for this.
Long live the queen!
July 26, 2023
horror stories
November 10, 2024
Some of these stories fuck so severely that I think this is a 5 star read in spite of not loving like every single one
December 9, 2024
This is my bible
did-not-finish
October 10, 2025DNF @ 43%
October 10, 2025
just a few stories that didn’t speak to me as much but the first few were really good
enjoyed the writing style and will be checking out more of her work
enjoyed the writing style and will be checking out more of her work
Read
December 2, 2025This book reached inside me and squeezed something in me and made me feel staticky and I think it’s stuck like that now
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews