Left Hand

by Paul Curran

"Left Hand is every reason why Paul Curran is one of the smartest, most daring, meticulous, violent, delicate, awe-inspiring new fiction chiselers in the known world, if you ask me. His work has been a huge favorite of lucky insiders like me for years, and now the secret is finally and definitely out." -Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Literature, Contemporary, Dark, Novels, Bizarro Fiction

Unknown Binding

First published April 14, 2014

About the author

Books:
Generation Bloodbath (Apocalypse Party, 2022)
https://www.apocalypse-party.com/gene...

Left Hand (Schism2 Press, 2020)
https://schismpress.tumblr.com/SCHISM2

Anthologies:
Tormented Flesh Anthology (Anxiety Press, 2025)
https://www.amazon.com/shop/athinslic...

Look At Our Holes: An Anthology of Voids & Orifices (Plagued by Visions, 2025) https://www.amazon.com/Look-At-Our-Ho...

A Rancid Vat Anthology (Blamage Books, 2024)
https://pukepink.bigcartel.com/produc...

Infinity Land Press Anthology (2021)
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/ant...

Expat 4 Anthology (2021)
https://expatpress.com/product/expat-4/

instagram: @insanereading
website: insanereading.com

Reviews

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

c) Drag your wounds through the corrupted earth with your stump.

[Rick Harsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Left Hand by Paul Curran

This potty-mouthed grotesquery is a melange of methods expressing violence, sexual degeneracy, hatred and numbness, in a literary era in which so little is new that a reader will likely think 'I've seen this before', but though that may be true, must confront the question 'why not see it again.' That's the easy question. The more difficult question is why the extraordinary violence and sexual wackoffery and utter lack of humanity seem a more rational response to the current cultural and socioeconomic strictures of the latest civilization has to offer than any style of conformity. The book offers you two choices: vomit and burn the book, or ask why it needed to be written. Curran doesn't explain what's wrong with the world, with the current state of human existence; he provides a deformation and invites you to conceive your own conclusion. Mine is that his voices are, finally, a new normal, the rejection of which is inevitable, and thus will sustain the very insanity that makes these voices necessary. They will return.

[Sadie E · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m going to be honest: I hated this.

It's not that it's bad necessarily. But because it's doing something so aggressively weird that my brain basically left the building.

Maybe the real Left Hand was the emotional damage we accumulated along the way?

I can see the architecture and ambition. I can see the author standing over the corpse of the traditional novel with a scalpel, saying, “what if narrative wasn't a road but a pile of broken glass?” And then throwing the pile of broken glass at you.

The style's interesting. The chapters are labelled like 1.1, 5.4, etc., as though I'm reading the minutes from a cursed meeting. Each chapters made up of barely connected sentences presented as lists from a) to e). It’s fragmented and disorientating. And initially, I was fascinated.

I was ready to be challenged. I thought: okay, this is weird, but maybe this is the good kind of weird. Maybe I'm about to have a life-changing literary experience.

Instead, I spent the rest of the book feeling like I'd been locked inside the world’s most intellectual escape room, except there's no exit and the person who built the room is standing outside going, “but the inability to escape is actually an exploration of freedom.”

The experiment became the entire event.

The fragmentation stopped creating mystery and started creating distance. The structure stopped feeling like a doorway into the story and became a barrier between me and the story. I was admiring the craftsmanship while also wishing I could experience the book rather than analyse the machinery behind it.

This isn't a book failing at what it set out to do. It succeeded. The problem is me: I couldn't connect with what it set out to do.

There's clearly a huge amount of intelligence, precision, and artistic control here. To create something this disjointed while still allowing meaning to emerge is a seriously incredible feat. The author's insanely talented, and I have a lot of respect for the skill required to make chaos feel intentional.

There's a very deliberate attempt to dismantle ideas about storytelling, memory, identity, and meaning. It's not random. The frustrating thing is that it's very clearly the opposite: a lot of thought has gone into creating something that made me want to throw it into the sea.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am committed to taking a chance on experimental novels from time to time, and ‘Left Hand’ certainly did look promising. It started with ‘chapters’ labelled 1.1, 1.2 and so on and each ‘chapter’ had five or six not wholly connected sentences labelled a) b) c) and so on. I found this potentially interesting as I found myself joining together loose connections to try and create a picture, but I soon got bored with this. It’s like feeling totally fascinated when you are presented with the first 5 or 6 Rorschach inkblots, and how you lose interest by the eight or ninth. I was happy to find the format eventually changed into a more traditional styled look, but it was only traditional when looking at the page from a distance, reading it was equally challenging and even less productive. As with all these experimental ‘novels’, they are usually cheap on kindle, so I will always suggest you give them a try. Why not!

[A.J. Sahnow · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I have not read this novel. I do not read novels."

It doesn't matter what terms you try to apply to Left Hand, it will break your terms and break your face, and then tearfully apologise in the midst of self-mutilation. It will murder itself, and then murder you. It will always come back at the worst and best of times.

The most beautiful aspect of Paul Curran's Left Hand is its sincerity, its honesty. Through all of the bleak and bloody microscenes, there is no edge — it is not an active shooter with a manifesto; it is a sensitive mind beset by intrusive thoughts and images, a treatise on lonely repetition and a desire for connection, a form of reverse nostalgia where the past and the present are the same squirming mass of familiar organ tissue. Curran pours his heart out without ever truly showing his (left) hand.

"Most literature is boring, excessively foolish, and suffocates revolutionary cravings."

Left Hand is at once prose that wishes it was never born and miscarried poetry. Curran puts the work itself on trial, as if his own childhood were looking at what he had wrought, and can't make its mind up whether to be proud or sickened. It is (autoreflexive) (autocritical) (autobiographical), or none of the above. To the right reader, it has the potential to connect to everything you love in life, and everything you hate. It may bring back memories unwanted, or ones more pleasant. It is equally personal and distant.

Forget trying to stuff this work into a neat little category. It is simply literature to be read and returned to, crafted by an author unrestrained.

"Feel your lips moving to my voice saying thank you."

In summary: An engaging study on the artistic anxiety of working in transgressive fields. The unveiling of memory, the shadow-self and their honest contents. An inspirational narrative of unrelenting mutilation and fleshly impermanence. 5/5.

[Alex Budris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't let this book trick you into thinking you are not smart enough for it. It is really, honestly, not that good. I found it boring. Nice try, though. (I mean it, writing is hard. I've certainly never finished anything of this scope.)

[Ben Arzate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A kaleidoscope of deconstructed, decontetxualized scenes of violence, sexuality, self-mutilation, and metafiction.

[Julian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to give a disturbing book a try and gave this a shot. It’s divided into 4 chapters and the first chapter is a step by step guide to... something maybe, the narrators day to day. The first chapter had me very hooked with certain events in the narrators day to day while experiencing: drug abuse, derealization, Synesthesia, total body dysmorphia, psychosis, and a ton of other mental illness. This narrator who calls himself Robert, is constantly doing heroin, beating and sexually abusing his gay roommate Alex. Amputates his left arm for no reason. Losses his amputated arm that he kinda just drags around with him. This guys perpetually masturbating 24/7, having sex with prostitutes and beating them and killing them. Goes on a date with a girl and sexually assaults her and then tears her lady parts open killing her while she’s passed out on heroin. Chops her up and hides her body parts under his bed.

Pretty brutal I’m hooked. Then I read the second chapter.
The format changes to a standard novel format with paragraphs. The character seems to be different, and it seems to be a diary excerpt. The sentences are continuous and drawn out to show the mental string of thoughts the narrator is going through. This character appears to be a Hermaphrodite. The actions are depicted are constantly being contradicted for example, the narrator says they killed their mother and father numerous times just to be speaking with them later on. The chapter has themes of extreme masochistic and sadistic acts, mental illness, constant sexual assault and acts, torture and murder and drug use. These scenes have no buildup and jump to each other one after another to the point of ad fucking nauseam. There is no plot, just the ceaseless, incoherent babbling of the narrator. The meaningless violence quickly within a couple pages becomes so overwhelming that it loses any entertainment value and quickly becomes a chore to read. With no plot as a backbone to hold this book up, all it appears to be is an absolute edge fest.

I wanted to pirate this book but couldn’t find it anywhere online so I ordered it off amazon for $10 and I regret it wholeheartedly. 0/5

[Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes a writer like Curran so dangerous to other writers is that after reading him it's an eternal struggle to try not to write like him. This man and his words scare the shit outta me, make me want to snap my pens, bleed the ink out and never write another word again. Paul Curran falls into that small group of writers who transgress subject, language, idea, structure and genre... and that is the true violence of his words. He dismembers literature, cuts it up and sews it back together in his own inimitable way. A true lone wolf and a favourite writer of mine long before he ever had a single letter published. Readers take pleasure; writers beware: this guy is the real-fuckin-deal! Hurrah!

[Timothy Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will disassemble you into large undigested chunks of desire.
This book has no true enemy and no natural predator.
This book will make you want to encase your hands in iron and never write again.
This book will bore a hole into your cerebrum via the amygdala and seize up your creative process.
This book was never meant for this world.
This book is a breath that you never knew you needed, and now, can't live without.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curran's Left Hand is a work of delicately iterated detail in which sexual violence, mutilation and death circulate in continuous service to its abbreviated narratives. The result is a text of rare positivist beauty in which every object is every other's fucktoy, for no reason, beyond this world being all that is the case: a box of polaroids of amputated victims, waiting for their dream of integral existence to end.

[Josh Doughty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most masturbatory and nuanced-metafictional book I’ve ever read.

Nurse on an alcoholic beverage every time your line of sight meets the word “cock”.

Some interesting and shocking ideas can be found inside.

Read if you enjoyed the second half of 120 Days Of Sodom.

[Brett Glasscock · Rating 2 out of 5]

honestly not very good. it felt like just a recombination of experimental weird fiction tropes. kinda boring. there were moments of good prose tho. sorry nic

[Hazzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

as someone who loves a good coherent story, this gave me everything but that, in the loveliest (most horrid) way possible. had to fight for my life trying figure out what the fuck i was reading

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whether or not you follow the instructions, it's obvious that you and I have already been down this road. It's a road to oblivion--I know, I know--but we've been looking forward to undoing every bit of ourselves for ages. Might as well go out in a flame of anxiety and atrocity. That's what I tell myself all the time. If it's going to end, it might as well be today.

So why wait? I'm tired of talking about it. Let's roll.

[Colin Klink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Social isolation and absolute depravity run straight through Paul Curran’s brain to his fingers and onto the page in his debut novel Left Hand. Shocking thoughts, shocking actions, shocking decisions, and an unprecedented style hacked right into my neurons and made me disgusted and delighted at every page. How can a human even write something like this? I’m in awe.

[B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many big, exciting swings with several compelling hits and a fair number of misses.

[jane cum · Rating 1 out of 5]

We should never have let bisexuals read Dennis Cooper

[Joel Ralls · Rating 2 out of 5]

“a) See someone grabbing your arm off a boy stroking it.

b) Watch someone throwing your arm over your bed to someone.

c) Hear Alex telling someone you were in a car accident.

d) Say to a girl that it was not an accident.

e) Listen to your voice telling everyone you are not joking.”


“I meet a boy in Nepal. He opens a tissue to the midday sun in order to see the skin layers outside a dead girl's eye completely waterless. He removes the layers until there is nothing left. He says no one will ever understand my brain conversations, and this vulgar literary experiment is a cheap zombie movie compilation. I reply with something along the lines of new methods are needed for seeing and exceeding language and things and the start of non-books that can read you reading them and can feel you feeling them. He says this novel is meaningless and completely continual, its own interview with itself, a long cool masturbation, a serpent sucking its own penis until it flips inside out and back again. He closes by saying these are not your hands. These are not hands. These are not.”

“My teacher purchases a first edition of this novel in a secondhand bookstore and compares it with an earlier edition, where horrible things happen to me in unfilmable detail, downloaded from the internet.
My teacher asks to meet my parents. I tell my teacher and my parents I cannot be responsible for the actions of my limbs. I make hundreds of inadequate attempts to explain the theory behind this novel, but without words or silence, the whole thing disintegrates into a grinding, uselessly large number of unintelligible patterns.”

“Perhaps I could have paid someone to write this better for me. It would have been funnier and less egocentric. With sexuality and murder, I am more perplexed than anything.”

_____________________________________________________

This book is at its most interesting when it’s posing questions about the authors and readers of transgressive fiction, which it does in a way I’ve never seen a book attempt before. Also, as someone with OCD, I find the frenetic Rolodex of upsetting images to be an interesting literary parallel to intrusive thoughts (not necessarily the author’s intention, just something I noticed).

I read an interview the author did with Thomas Moore where he talks at length about the construction of this novel, and that’s totally worth checking out. However, despite all its self-awareness and self-flagellation, it does end up kind of being exactly what it’s telling you it is. In short, it just wasn’t all that interesting for me to read after a while. There are strokes of genius here, but it ends up being a chore to find them floating in the muck of samey, hyper-violent vignettes.

[Hüseyin Akgöçmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually finished this several days ago, but sheesh, what a ride. Paul Curran’s psychotic prose-poetry is so defiantly singular I can only let the text speak for itself:

“I clamp his wrists and overwhelm him. I tighten a USB cable around his neck and slit his throat. He cries at the sight of his own blood. I think he understands a number of sounds, perhaps four or five, but no more words. I push acid into his beautiful face. His terrestrial body enters into other conditions. I fill him with morphine and do not give him water. He wakes up. He dies. Perhaps he does not do anything. It is late. I stick needles into the boy and then inject myself with his blood and consciousness. The air deviates near the surface as I shake the semen from my penis into his mouth. I enjoy his body. I play with his body until he wakes up. I dig a hole somewhere through him using my tongue as a shovel.”

These are the words of a 21st century Sadean nightmare and it thrilled me endlessly with its meticulous rhythms and OTT grotesqueries.

[El Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Paul Curran did a fine job of plucking this from the depths of introspection. I enjoyed the interactive aspects where he steps back momentarily to highlight conditions while also rendering them useless. Admittedly, I found myself a little underwhelmed in part and felt as though the cut-throat obscurity became a crutch at times. However, that's one persons perception, and it is made to seem intentional, so perhaps I didn't immerse myself entirely.

4.5

"When a novel is written into the wrong body, the body must do something unwritten. I do not want to be a writer, but I have to write this novel. I express these things as the corpse of a narrator who has been made a zombie in a motel without rooms. I have removed the walls because they form a false connection between the conscious writer and the plural transcendental beings who believe single author production is directly responsible for any created text."

[Dorie Van Dercreek · Rating 3 out of 5]

An abstract grocery list.
I'm still trying to digest.

[lucas · Rating 2 out of 5]

harassment architecture gore-core

[Coby Newell · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone looking for an amalgamation of Michael Gira’s ‘The Consumer’ and J.G Ballard’s ‘Atrocity exhibition’, look no further. ‘left Hand’ has pages that are filled with primordial instruction and dreamlike hellscapes of the rarest variety. Constantly dancing the fine line between daring and distasteful, I found myself unable to tear away from the vivid imagery of debauchery and depravity. I look forward to Paul Curran’s work to come, and diving more into the work he has done in the past.

[Alicia A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nasty, strange & ahead of it’s time. The writing of this book is something I have never seen before. 3.5/5

[Nathália]

Well, that was... unpleasant.

[Elle VanGilder]

yeah yeah transgressive in style and content blah blah; every time this britishisms came out (“wanked” “arse”) i was forced into the world of giggles

[rue · Rating 3 out of 5]

the book had potential for being a good and interesting description of someone with schizophrenia or dissociative personality disorder but the poor writing at times made it seem mediocre at best

[Shaq · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is just an anthology of random depravity.

[Raminta · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think the single okay-ish thing about Left Hand is how self-aware it is.