Empty the Sun by Mattson, Joseph (2010) Paperback

by Joseph Mattson

Here I was, doing ninety on the Santa Monica Freeway with a quart of whiskey shoved into my crotch and my dead neighbor in the trunk. It had come time to leave Los Angeles... Thus begins the pre-apocalyptic, cross-country race with death to bury the murdered past in Joseph Mattson's Empty The Sun, an urgent, beautifully reckless novel of transgressive loss and hunted redemption culminating in a shotgun fight with God. Includes an open-road, open-whiskey soundtrack by enigmatic and stunning Drag City recording artist Six Organs of Admittance.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

Paperback

First published November 1, 2009

About the author

OUT NOW:

THE SPEED CHRONICLES (Editor/contributor. Anthology of new fiction about the drug speed, feat. William T. Vollmann, Sherman Alexie, Jerry Stahl, Beth Lisick, Megan Abbott, James Greer, and more. Akashic Books).

EMPTY THE SUN (Novel with Soundtrack by Six Organs of Admittance)

EAT HELL

TWO LETTERS COLLECTION OF ART & WRITING VOL. 2

GIRLVERT: A PORNO MEMOIR by ORIANA SMALL aka ASHLEY BLUE (Edited by Joseph Mattson)

Forthcoming/In-Progress:

COURTING THE JAGUAR (novel)
HEXICO (novel)
WESTERN VIOLENCE AND BRIEF SENSUALITY (screenplay)
ALL THAT MATTERS IS THE WOLF (poems)
LAST SEEN IN BARSTOW/LAST SCENE IN BARSTOW (play)
JESUS DICE (novel)
HUNTED BY SAVAGES (nonfiction)

Also editing VIRGINS IN REVERSE and THE INTRUSION, two excellent novellas by Gabriel Hart--Mr. Hart is known in sonic circles as vocalist/songwriter/big chief of the band JAIL WEDDINGS; Hart was formerly ringleader of the desperados THE STARVATIONS--stay tuned for his literary debut coming soon...

"Joseph Mattson is a monster of a writer." --Beth Lisick, author of EVERYBODY INTO THE POOL and HELPING ME HELP MYSELF

"Joseph Mattson writes like a guitar player with nineteen fingers--everywhere at once, stinging, dark and beautiful. EMPTY THE SUN will take you to some strange places, but the trip is amazing. Mattson has written a truly inventive and vivid novel." --Jerry Stahl, author of PERMANENT MIDNIGHT and PAIN KILLERS

"Several passages induced the shiver of aesthetic bliss in my spine that Nabokov famously described as the indicator of good and true writing. The whole thing is by turns hilarious and hilariously sad, artfully pin-holed with melancholy (my favorite drink)... EMPTY THE SUN is an impressive achievement, as well as an excellent and I believe as yet unused name for a rock band." --James Greer, author ARTIFICIAL LIGHT and GUIDED BY VOICES: A BRIEF HISTORY

"Joseph Mattson is one hell of a motherfucking writer."
--Jeff Garlin, author of MY FOOTPRINT: CARRYING THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD and co-star/executive producer of HBO's CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

** now with cd review

so whenever anyone gives me a book to review, my trendency is to be more forgiving with it than if it's something i actually had to pay for or pick out for myself. it's like a nice reciprocal thing to do - you give to me, i give back. but this time, i didn't have to be too gentle, i really enjoyed this book. it is occasionally a little slick and tricky with its wordplay,and it's not my usual story,to be sure, but i found a lot of it to be spot-on and nicely lyrical. "the marooned oaks, bent as dried witches frozen in sacred acts, dotted the black hills of the mountains breaking from the coast, and grew blacker along the road to Paso Robles". unexpected imagery always gets to me. and this passage is rather long, but i liked it as a piece: "I couldn't bear to let Hal rot away into anonymous oblivion in The Amigo, the ramshackle hotel we lived in which decades before had been a toy factory warehouse. If dreams were once born in the belly of that old building's former incarnation then they sure as hell went back there now to die. No, too many unsigned bodies had been hauled out of the place already. Disaffected former wives surrendered to alcohol, abused and saintly prostitutes, zombie junkies with no discipline, general head cases fried too long under the unforgiving Southern California sun, vets, the discomfited scarred and obese, unknown Blues legends, and a score of forsaken others. The Amigo was first-rate for the crestfallen. Refuge is not a pretty thing. Hal and I ended up there for a similar core reason dressed up in different circumstances: We were each wholly alone in the world after losing something we couldn't afford to lose, which opened a hole so deep in our lives that absolutely nothing could possibly fill it." I don't know, that was just something at the beginning that i found myself rereading, i think i just liked the sentence about refuge, but it made no sense out of context, so i had to type the whole damn thing, despite my shitty typing skills.


let me just free-associate about l.a. for a minute: earthquakes, fake tits, the doors, small dogs, aborted expectations, expensive clothes, phil lewis, self-importance, glare, sun, sun fucking sun... so yeah - except for my long-dormant junior high crush on phil lewis, all bad things.and i've never actually been to l.a., naturally, my opinions are never based on anything concrete; i just have new york mindset about it as being somewhere far away and "other" in 'learn to swim' land. and i hate the heat. and i don't drive. so basically, i'm here where i am safe. and this isn't technically an l.a. novel, because it travels, but the beginning is sort of a love letter to the bitch of a city, which is his description, not mine. but i did find the descriptive passages of the city alluring,is the point, for all my left-coast suspicions. i have a headache and it is pushing on the critical functions of my brain, so if this makes no sense, forgive.

i'm working on getting this into the store, and all you locals can run in and pick it up and celebrate the lure of the other coast.

oh, and there's a cd, but i havent listened to that yet.
tom fuller rolls his eyes.

** so, yeah, that cd was not at all what i was expecting. i figured it would be all balls and blues and whiskey and driving, or something like the black crowes, but it was actually quite pretty guitar instrumentals, mostly. it's no niandra lades, but it's pretty nice all the same. i guess that's a review.

[D. Pow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dead Prussians I’ve always thought that the famous Nietzsche phrase ‘God is dead’ is deceptively complex. The crazy old Prussian didn’t say ‘God Never Was’ or ‘The whole idea of God is utter shit’ but he said ‘God is dead’, implying that God was once living and maybe even vital and important. It is the phrase of a profoundly sensitive and religiously suffused man whose last sane act before he disappeared into syphilitic psychosis was to protect a horse with his own body from the callous whips of its owner.

The Book Itself:1 I thought of Nietzsche’s famous cry from the depths more than once when I read Joseph Mattson’s wonderful, warped and whisky-soaked novel Empty The Sun. This novel is a lot of things- a love letter to the blues and the blues based aesthetic, a road trip from hell to hell, a partial redemption of those maimed and lost, - but it is primarily an argument, even a duel with God, that postulates both the necessity of having to kill that old bastard in some of his incarnations, and a celebration of some the sweeter and more lasting of his creations.

Disclaimer:I know Joseph Mattson. I’ve hung with him several times in seedy bars in Hollywood and Echo Park. I’ve drank whisky, argued books, ogled strippers and karaoked with him. I consider him a friend in the sense that I’d buy him a drink if I saw him and I hope he’d buy me one. But we don’t really know each other beyond those few occasions, I don’t expect him at any family functions anytime soon and none of my kids are named after him(though my 2nd SON is named MATT(hew) JOSEPH which is about as close to Joseph Mattson as you can get). But I think Mattson is a good dude, though a bit too wild for me, a notorious drunk and degenerate who has been known to squeeze the asses of women he barely knows. But I digress. I dissemble. The point of this disclaimer is to note the fact that this book was GIVEN to me by the author. Now before you think that would somehow influence my rating of this hunk of pulped wood please note my previous high standards for reviews and please be aware that though Mattson gave me a copy of his book the chicken chawing RAT BASTARD did not inscribe it, notate it, or in anyway prettify said book for me. Disclaimer over.

The Book Itself:2There is a great track called ‘Move’ that opens Miles Davis’ ‘The Birth of the Cool’. The thing I always loved best about it is that it seems to come from a place where it has been playing for a century and then fades back out of ear range with Miles and company still blowing for eternity and a day. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the principle of ‘In Media Res’. Shits already begun, it’s moving faster than fuck, immersion baby, deal with it. And that is exactly what Mattson does with Empty The Sun too.

Some serious stuff has already gone down right there on page one: a possibly prophetic encounter with God, the loss of a finger and the corresponding grief over it, a vision of the apocalypse and the death of a dear friend. Mattson is juggling so many balls right from the get go, that you just marvel at his virtuosity. The dude can write. Sentence after sentence is stuffed with information and frenzy-fingered blues cadence and chording, like perfectly roasted bell peppers stuffed with cream cheese, it’s marvelous, messy and oozing with creative goodness. Strangely though for such a word drunk, machine gun spray of language, the goings on in the book are strangely claustrophobic and anxiety-provoking. One can argue whether the book is too wordy, frenetic and smart for its own good, but when it comes to questions of style I think that authentic artists(and I’ll grant rat bastard Mattson that) reach their style through long, bloodied-fingered(though hopefully no missing digits) apprenticeship to their craft and after a certain point they can write in no other way then one; their style is an organic extension of their selves and no more can be tampered with than their heart, lungs or livers.

This book is really a wonderful revelation of a certain dark place in the American Soul. It is violent, seedy, filled with animal totems, heroin-addicted dwarf chicks, highways at 2am on whisky and nothing else, whole swathes of California Coastal meanderings and over and over again arguments, fights, revelations with one version of our Big Sky Pappy who might be in Heaven or might just be dead, simply dead. Mattson’s world view is bleak, bleaker than mine, but it is not surfeit of hope and his easy, athletic prowess with the written word prove even journeys straight into the jaws of hell can be worth taking .

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I would have enjoyed this book more if some discussion on Goodreads hadn't happened right before I started the book. I forget which book it was for, but MFSO and I started talking about Zweig, and his indulgent novel. MFSO mentioned some things that would always make him think of Zweig, and with that thought kind of fresh in my head I went into this book.

The main character is a down and out guitar player who no longer plays guitar because he lost his left index finger, the one that most guitar players would use for forming a barre chord, and probably the most dominant finger on the fretting hand. He now wallows in an alcoholic haze living in a seedy motel, that sounds more like a glorified shooting gallery where he mourns the loss of himself and his guitar playing. Unfair, but I can't help thinking of Zweig and his own 'wah, I won't play my guitar, wah I'm sad, wah no one understands me'. Yeah, the character isn't a crybaby about it, but I couldn't get Zweig out of my goddamn mind.

Trying to push Zweig aside, this book was good, and I imagine lots of people really liking it, but it wasn't for me. It was a little too beat for me, a little too mystical in a rock n' roll kind of way (that makes no sense, it's not like hippy-ish, more like the transcendent wisdom of people who have (ab)used too many substances in their day). I think if I had read this when I was younger I would have liked it more, like back when I eagerly consumed every Bukowski book... but then as I said this is more rock n' roll than I ever was, I liked my 'road' reading to be more punk, a la Aaron Cometbus.

When Karen succeeds in getting this into to the store I will definitely recommend it to certain customers, maybe it will even move one day to my default recommendations shelf.

I have no idea what the CD sounds like yet, I have been on a total non-music kick for the last couple of weeks, but I'll give it a listen when I once again return to the world of sound entertainment.

[brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

damn you joseph mattson for seizing on a great metaphor before i had the chance. in all its pulpy overthetop excess mattson has his protagonist stand opposite god in a serge-leone-style shotgun showdown! yup. a showdown with god. preposterous and surreal and it could only work in mattson's noir-gone-wild booze-drenched nightmare of a novel. there are times, perhaps, in which mattson pushes up too close to his literary forefathers (fante, steinbeck, etc), but he plays it straight, stays focused, and much of the time transcends said writers. no small achievement. the wonderful scene in which our hungry hero pulls to the side of the road, scurries on down into a peach orchard, and stuffs his gut with the fat & ripe fruit is one of the truly great scenes, one of those moments in which words manage to convey the sheer joy of being alive; and the final extended sequence with the old woman and the gothed-up house and god hanging by a noose from a skeleton tree… hot damn, joe, slow down.

joe is a good friend. i've sat in his company many a late night drinking laughing or crying, had him throw up in my bathroom, pass out on my couch, wax poetic on the lyrics of townes van zandt, had him hold a knife to my neck for daring to play the grateful dead at a kentucky derby party, and have seen his tough guy facade instantly melt when a friend's in need of a sensitive soul. i've seen him through all phases of this novel and i'm proud of the guy. he did it. he had the fortitude and the conviction and the confidence and the talent to stick it out. and he made something pretty fucking special.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ultimate road novel where one finds itself in the strangest places. Joseph Mattson has a way with words like a master guitarist. And this book is in a sense about a guitarist who cannot play guitar anymore due to the talents of the LAPD Dog Unit. Nevertheless life for him sort of stops, but what happens afterward with his meeting with the LAPD is an adventure that is both real and spiritual - and its that mixture that makes this novel a real go-go.

Noir like but goes off to another world. While readng the novel I sort of made combinations in my mind like the film "Two-Lane Blacktop" mixed with David Goodis' surreal downers of his various novels. Superb work all around.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Paperback. I believe JM gave this copy to me at the Formosa Café in Hollywood, around the time of the Literary Pub Crawl, because I used the flyer as my bookmark. I also discovered, tucked in the pages, a ticket stub from Angels Flight. Fitting.]

After reading this book, I felt like drying out for the next six years.

I read it on the porch of Jack Kerouac’s old house, which seemed appropriate somehow. It’s a road book, a book about salvation and redemption and holiness, about self-destruction and self-discovery, love and wildness and the brutality/serenity of just being alive, moment to moment.

The star of this book is not necessarily the plot or the characters (although it’s peopled with familiar Beat archetypes: junkie prophets, drunks and sleazeballs, fringe-dwelling phantoms and burned-out bluesmen). Taking the spotlight is the hyper-hallucinatory prose, refulgent and indulgent and foaming-at-the-mouth, which works because the book is less than 200 pages, and that kind of narrative voice can only be maintained (effectively) for so long. The chapters are rich with spiky-blossom prose and fallen-saint set-pieces (a fleabag lonelyhearts hotel in downtown LA, all manner of seedy bars and music halls, a beach of elephant seals on the Pacific Coast, an American Gothic farmhouse with a woman spewing “Exorcist”-like humors) but not big on subtlety or modulation. This is an adrenaline burst, a story told in one rabid register, so one shouldn't go into it expecting much plot development - although it did slow down for some gentle, more dialogue-driven scenes at the farmhouse.

There is one dramatic device that I never find compelling (a personal taste of mine) and that is: using conversations with God (or God as a character, or messages from God) as either a narrative centerpiece or motivating conflict. Whenever I see these, my alarm bells go off: "a-ha, a shortcut to imbuing a story with Big Meaning or quasi-spiritual profundity!" It’s not to say that questions of religion or mysticism are rote or unwelcome, but I just couldn’t get into the "holy-holy-holy/raging at God/flipping God the bird while I glug my whiskey/shotgun duel with my maker" angle… maybe it seemed too easy a place to fix the protagonist’s neediness and blame (and emotional depth). Or maybe it seemed like a distraction from the more compelling human relationships, which are rendered so vibrantly here, and with so much texture: “We had convinced ourselves that we weren’t apathetic because we were wise, that grief was wisdom, that loss was a badge, which, it turns out, amounted to bullshit because what we had really done was killed action.” That kind of stuff is gold.

Off to listen to the CD.

[Bronwyn Mauldin · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Raw milk and razor wire."

Read this novel not for the plot, but for the metaphors, which are intense and engaging. It's a bit overwritten - a brilliant rhetorical flourish often stands better on its own rather than sandwiched between two mediocre ones. If you like guitar solos that run to twenty minutes, this book is for you. But when Mattson's writing shines, it does so brightly.

One word of warning: Come to this book with an iron stomach. There is a great deal of drinking followed by vomiting, generally followed by the narrator combing chunks of spew out of his beard with his bare hands.

For all its literary bravado, "Empty The Sun" is, fundamentally, a love story. It sneaks up on you gently and sweetly, ending on a note of bittersweet heartbreak and hope.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will fully admit that I bought this book (at a Rangda show, I believe) for the Six Organs of Admittance CD. It sat unread and ignored on the computer desk for a long while. I'm glad I finally picked it up, though, because this book is amazing from its opening line onward. Teetering between darkly funny and surreally terrifying, the writing is fresh and original, weaving past and present into one long, rambling, redemptive blues. Read this.

[Tara Ferris · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt like this book wanted to be if Jack Kerouac and William Faulkner had a baby book. That's what this was trying to be, and it was not successful. It just didn't work for me. There were a few interesting visuals but that's about all I can say in the positive realm. I probably would have loved this book about 10 years ago...I read it a decade too late.

[P X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful sentences, vivid imagery. Lost me for a few weeks but glad I came back to finish the book. The theology discourse was surprising and brought up specific points I hadn’t thought about and now I cannot stop thinking about. Lastly, the author is clearly gifted and I would be interested in reading something a bit less high brow by him.

[Brandi Briscoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic story of the human experience when dredged in turmoil and sadness. Joseph Mattson is a brilliant writer who reminds me a lot of the great Beatniks.

[laila* · Rating 3 out of 5]

would’ve been better without the business abt the guitar—give it a rest!!

[hence]

road salt..: i could go back to smoking spirits

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

From publisher

Either I am getting better and better at knowing what I like, or everyone is writing really amazing books lately. (or I am getting softer and easier to please as I age, but we won't go there!)

Empty the Sun was a book I stumbled across accidently, and it looked interesting so I reached out to Tyson Cornell of Rarebirdlit.com for a review copy. No, I am not ashamed to put myself out there like that. Yes, he was an absolute peach to agree to ship it out. So Tyson, I'm blowin' a little kiss your way as my way of saying thanks!

Joseph Mattson does an outstanding job of infusing reality with an alter-reality, creating a protagonist like none that I have read before. A guitar fiend with a penchant for whiskey and a strong dislike for God - our main man finds himself backed between a rock and a hard place time and time again.

Playing gigs with a guy known as Sweet Julio gets him in a heap of trouble when some not-so-straight cops chuck him in the back of a K-9 van to question him in the presence of a caged and agitated German Shepard. Unable to give the cops the information they want, they feed his left index finger - the most important finger, the fret finger - to the dog and throw him out onto the street.

In shock and bleeding heavily, traveling down the center lane of the highway, he is rescued by Hal and Little Pam, and the threesome become fast friends.

6 nights ago, he dreams of God. God tells him the world will end in 6 days. God tells him he might as well end it now.

Upon waking, he goes to see Hal to discuss the dream, and finds his friend dead. Rather than call for help, he wraps Hal up in a blanket, tosses him in the trunk of his car, and heads out of Los Angeles on a mission. A mission that involves drugs, drinking, elephant seals, knuckle bones, music, a blind Blues guitarist, and a long lost love who lies dying, and God.

Once I started reading this novel, it was easy to see why it has garnered such great reviews.

Joseph deals with things like addiction, religion, and love in very real terms. He impregnates his characters with these failings, allowing them to wallow in their inadequacies. Heck, they even see themselves as failures, as lost souls, hopeless and unfixable.

Hal, who we come to know through a series of memories (or flashbacks), punished himself his entire life for a mistake he made 40 years ago. He prefers the dark of night, cursing the sun, sleeping in late and staying up all night, filling his veins with the mind-numbing power of heroin.

Our main guy loses his ambition and focus when he loses his fret finger, living the drunk life of one who will never see better days, pining for the old days and listening to Hal's twisted words of wisdom. Though he has no respect for God, he seems to find him in everything he does, feels God watching him, believes God is taunting him on his runaway mission. He hallucinates meetings with God, who challenges him during these final 6 days.

Mattson's writing is thick and chunky - he produces paragraphs that almost need to be chewed, before they can be swallowed. He is another very quote worthy writer. He are some beautiful lines from the story (that I just couldn't help tweeting):

"I did not look up because if there was a heaven I did not want any part of it".

"The heart is a wonderful and stubborn beast".

"Have you ever been in love? The kind of love that feels so good and bad at the same time that you just want to punch yourself in the face forever?"

Empty the Sun is packaged with a music CD by the band Six Organs of Admittance. I had never heard of the band before reading this book, and I had a hard time listening to the music AND reading the book, because my brain wasn't sure which thing it should be focusing on, so it attempted to focus on both at the same time. #readingfail.

I read a good chunk of the book first, then familiarized myself with the band's music, and happily married the two together for the final stretch. The instrumental guitar sounds of Six Organs of Admittance was a nice compliment to Mattson's book.

Which, of course, then led me to searching the internet for more instrumental music that would compliment all of the other novels that are patiently waiting to be read. And that search, well, it led me to creating this post about music to read to.

So I thanked Tyson at the beginning of the review, but I also owe a thank you to Joseph Mattson (1) for writing such an amazing novel and (2) for rekindling an old old old obsession of mine, music to read to.
http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars! Why?!! The book: 3 stars. The books is Jack Kerouac, meets Waiting for Godot inside a Tenacious D music video.
I love sci fi and fantasy. But the book didn’t hit those parts of the brain. It was a solid 3 star short story at under 200 pages.
It kept me entertained and interested. The meta aspect of it….lost me in the mail me of it all. Still questioning what exactly happened. But maybe it’s a Godot feeling.
The same feeling I had when I finished that book. 3 stars for the book. 1 extra star for the CD it came with. Discovered a new band to listen to…and the music is folky blues. The Album is the same name of the book and the band is Six Organs of Admittance. Best $2 spent at Goodwill.

[Willspeare · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took awhile to get into this. Just enough "wow" sentences to keep me reading. I suffered a lot of imagination envy, too, for the piled on bits of God imagery and metaphor. It's not necessarily like you've never read anything like it before, but it drew me out of some conventional thinking and stretched my theological reservoir and preconceptions.

I was honestly a little fascinated by the heroin and alcohol use and how these chemicals might have influenced what was going on here and I'll also admit, as a never-user and sheltered middle class goody-goody, I didn't get it. And by "it", I don't just mean the drug use, I mean the overall metaphorical framework. I won't chalk this up to poor conveyance, because I did get a nearly tactile sense of passion for music or at least for finding something meaningful in your own destiny that drives you and shapes you. This is fleshed and real and valid and sometimes painful and unsettling.

Still mentally masticating this leading me to conclude it is worth the effort to read and maybe reread.

Just how to incorporate the accompanying cd is a bit baffling.

[Jinny Chung]

"No, for the first time in my life what I feared was leaving. Leaving Los Angeles. Gone would be the long bleached avenues of warm disquiet, the whispering seven-story palms towering with wise endurance above the mashed commutes of countless human insects stitching paths across each others' sordid lives, nestled below the caustic trademark layer of smog that governs the puppet show, where hope and despair collide in intersections of the same blue smoke that aspirations are made of and then burned to. And with it all, the sanctimony of the place. I feared losing the city with neither indifference nor nostalgia. I'd simply gotten too used to it. In its familiarity lived my fear."

If you have a tumultuous love/hate relationship with Los Angeles, then GET ON WITH IT. Pick this up and read the hell out of it.

[Joel Jennings · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of tough magic realism that borders extremly close to over-kill. I've known "writers" all my life who claim they're writing a book that would look very much like this one... All whisky, blood, bile, rock n roll etc... But Mattson pulls it off with the stunning beauty of his prose. By the time you're up to your neck in disillusioned young man, you're already on his side. He loves his characters. There's enough compasion between the belts of whisky to justify the whole thing. And Mattson doesn't preach, his character observes and reports. Something a lesser writer would screw up with thinly veiled opinions. It falls a little short of being completly satisfying. But that's because the story gets your hopes up. I found myself looking to invest some of my own ideas of redemtion, and alas, it's the characters story, not yours. Some of the best prose about LA I've every read.

[matteo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every so often, a book will remind me that books are smarter than me. This is often because my friend Dave recommended the book, and he is smarter than me. This book comes in the vein of On the Road, Hunter S. Thompson, The Glass Bead Game, and other metaphysical works that I. Just. Don't. Completely. Understand. It frequently uses stream of consciousness, which is almost always somewhat hard to decipher. It's not a hard read, but it is by no means easy. Parts of the book struck me as awesome (including the opening lines). But there were other parts where, after I finished a passage, I immediately realized that I had no idea what had just taken place.

[Elliott · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are books about being "on the road;" and there are books about "the search for meaning;" and there are books about the bond of friendship between two "lost souls." There are books about being a self-aware addict or alcoholic, and books about feeling cursed by God and being really angry with him about it; and there are books about it "being all about the music, man!"

"Empty the Sun" is a little of all of these books, written by someone who was probably told by a dozen or so of his friends that he should write a book.

NB: I swear I don't mean that last part as derisively as it sounds.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the LP version that comes with a large format 12 inch X 12 inch version of the novel. Ditto on my last review about five stars. Those not familiar with Six Organs of Admittance, check out www.sixorgans.com, www.emptythesun.com, and www.dragcity.com.

Those not familiar with god, shotguns, whiskey, elephant seals, waterfowl slaughterhouses, motor oil, unknown blues legends, lovely prairie wraiths, etc., and downtown Los Angeles by way of the jaundiced spine of the nation, then please read the novel.

All my best,
Joseph

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars rather. I bought this book for my boyfriend because I thought it was cool it came with a Six Organs of Admittance CD. I found the first few pages to be wrought with cliche--young, drunken, reckless bearded musician-type, with a Jesus complex at age 33 to boot. From there, though, I didn't look back. I'd have finished it in a single sitting if I could have. Fiery turns of phrase lift the story from the words on the page, I dare say ecstatically in some places. And the telling is both unique and compelling.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Enjoyed it for a little over half way, then felt like the foundations of story and character gave way to poetic stylizing, which is ok, but I think it occurred at the expense of addressing some of the main questions of the story: what happened to the end of the world? How did the main character feel about that? Was there any resolution to his alcohol induced psychosis, or his thoughts about maybe playing the guitar again? Can you kill an old lady and get away with it? These questions seem important, but I guess they aren't, really?

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm giving my own book five stars on behalf of the Six Organs of Admittance soundtrack included. Ben Chasny & Steve Ruecker really came through with a whiskey-soaked driving record ready for your cross-country dashboard!

And, well, yes, I do have my own faith that the novel is good, too. It's about a shotgun fight with God. And other things.

Cheers,
Joseph

[Bert · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is Rapture for Christians... But for those of us bent on a more studied and carefully chosen life, there is Empty the Sun! A near biography for anyone passionate about what Life holds, dear and close. Lived, Loved, and Lost. If only to be found again through Joseph Mattson's writing. Something at once precious and prescient

[Devora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Double shot of bourbon - neat. This LA-based novel is a poetic ode to Los Angeles and California as a place to escape to and at the same time where one's inner demons fester. This novel is deep and burns down your throat. If you allow it, this novel will take you to the deep, dark crevices of your mind and soul. At the end, it is a story of regret, love, loyalty and resurrection.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edition gets 5 stars for the incredible new artwork by Becky Smith! And for all of the other reasons listed for the other editions. Thank you to everyone who's been so overwhelmingly supportive--for making the first edition sell out so fast, enough to warrant this new printing. I am tenderly honored. Cheers!
--Joseph

[b · Rating 4 out of 5]

The language seems to always hit the mark and it makes the music in the plot feel alive, but that said, it's pretty uninventive on that level. Sone nice absurd encounters and the play of meaning with or without the cd makes this a fun book to think on after you've finished it. An interesting self-indulgent strung-out road-novel.

[Gerard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting read, following the life of someone who feels like there's nothing left to lose. Definitely do not recommend copying what this guy does, but it's interesting enough to read about it.

I received this book for free through Goodreads Firstreads.

[Hafeez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wild prose, wild character