Stab Frenzy

by Gary J. Shipley

Stab Frenzy is about four members (once five) of an art collective bent on destroying their own identities, the complacency of humans, and art itself. It is a book about art and writing as art, and how our destructive impulses can sometimes be manifestations of a begrudging love.

Genres: Horror, Fiction

236 pages, Paperback

Published July 16, 2024

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.

Reviews

[Seb · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF 39%. I don't get it.

I'm probably too stupid to understand the new anti-art that is supposed to replace the previous anti-art that became the current art, this new anti-art being no art at all 😶

I liked the idea of using Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès as one of the MCs in first POV.

[Ben Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Dig a maze in the earth not a grave.”

Shipley has created a “codebook”, a kind of holy manifesto for the destroyers, where the only option is the impossible. Forget Warhol, Forget Hirst, Forget Eliasson, Shipley has proved writing can be art and StabFrenzy belongs in the permanent collection.(although most collections probably don’t deserve it)
Vicious, funny, ultra-violent, insanely smart satire where a group of artists are hellbent on disrupting art and in the process, destroying themselves. I love how much I learn from Shipley’s writing. I’m amazed by his encyclopedic brain. The chapter “The Mutant” and “The Meet” are both art pieces within this art piece.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a stab stab here
And a stab stab there

Here a stab, there a stab
Everywhere a stab stab

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'm wondering, can pure terror ever be genuinely experimental? If anything, life must be shorter and full of love; isn't that something they say? I'm much fonder of an asphyxiate's bulging eyes than I care to admit."

A novel of total, complete, merciless destruction. A book that's more artwork than it is story, an art piece that contains several more art pieces locked away inside of it - that's what you'll be treated to upon picking up Stab Frenzy. A highly experimental work, a total, utter void of violence, cruelty, passion and no regrets. Somehow, bafflingly, Shipley has crafted a book of vagueness and subtleties that's also told with such clarity it's like being slashed right across the face with a sharpened blade. Stab Frenzy is a horrifically, painfully, brutally gorgeous novel. It might just be a smarter idea to drink gasoline than it is to crack open the cover of this book, because once you do, once you read that very first line, you'll never be the same.

Art. Total self-annihilation. Violence. These are the three pillars that make up this supernova of a tale. Essentially a collection of short stories that are woven so tightly they make up one larger narrative, a total fucking apocalypse in print form, this is surely a novel that will linger in the back of my mind till the day I die. Completely, totally obliterating, devastating and ruinous, Stab Frenzy is a brilliant little thing and the mind of Gary J. Shipley is a marvelous and scary place. Stab Frenzy is, exceedingly bizarre, it's sickening and entirely brutal packed to the brim with nasty, awful gruesomeness, it's so utterly fantastic yet it's one of those novels that succeeds in making its readers feel foolish. What a bleak and saddening beast this unrelenting work of art is.

"I'd like to be indifferent to aging, but when you look as good as I look... He was a great-looking kid when I put the gun into the small of his back and... I kissed him on the mouth afterwards. He tasted of the mints he'd been eating. I'm tired of reading about the untimeliness of death. Death is never early, never late. It always knows just when to arrive."

Sometimes, everything in the universe aligns and you find a book that shoots you off into the stars, that's what Stab Frenzy will gift upon you. So fluid, so strange, so rammed full of weird musings, this novel will have you questioning if you've been spiked. This is a novel that belongs in a museum, it should be immortalized and read by all. Is Stab Frenzy simply the mindless chasing of an aesthetic, is it simply art leading to the undoing of man, or is it actually love? Whatever it is that this novel may be, whatever it may teach us, or whatever feelings it may stir within us, one thing is for certain - Stab Frenzy is a heat-seaking missile aiming directly for our souls, and it will find its mark.

"My activities were supposedly vague. They've got me down as a businessman, a lowly salesman, a failing one, debts racking up, suicide looming, only it wasn't that. If they could see me listening to Bach with all the lights turned off... Then they'd realize how well I am, how I shirk regret for a living, how refined I look in the dark."

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such an interesting collection of short stories that I will be thinking about for awhile. Shipley's prose is just brilliant.

[Tye! · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four individuals, a collective, dissolve before our eyes. They want to destroy art, they want to reverse art—they want to make it something new while also popping it like those McDonalds ketchup packets. I don’t know what that looks like, I don’t think they do either. Maybe that means the opposite of art—an empty canvas, maybe that’s destroying its source—death to humans, or maybe that’s making a mockery of it—the abject on steroids.

It is so clear that Shipley was having a great deal of fun writing this. In 2666 there’s a line that goes something like, “In all of fiction, poetry can be found.” Shipley proved that, his prose is so fun, so beautiful.

On that note, I’m sure some readers will find the writing pretentious, over the top, and at times it does feel that way, but there’s purpose there. While trying to destroy art, and themselves, this collective is making it (art)—everyone yell hypocrisy! They want to prove to others how art has gotten out of hand, bourgeois, pompous. I laugh at this because, in trying to do just that, they become their own worst enemies.

Maybe this isn’t supposed to be a satire, maybe I’m reading it wrong, but holy hell, put this piece in Mcsweeney’s, maybe 2am Adult Swim, because there’s so much to make fun of, there’s so much to love.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Once Wittgenstein has run out of relatives there will be no more books” is one of the better lines of the final laps I do say so after you’ve surfaced from The Mutant Section with its 46 (23 x 2) Continental lines.

Sometimes the stars line up. Just finished that book of Evenson dedicated to all the Pauls.


Be sure to have your favorite Latinate dictionary agglutinating all the cherry derivational affixes in one cozy spot lest your robes get spiked with cochineal pan trailing ribbons from the soaring logodaedalus you’re after here, up, us, and above.

I imagine DeLanda and Deleuze teaming up 2 to 1 on the pool table at the far border of Pappy & Harriet’s and Papua New Guinea against Jean Baudrillard soledad well after Forget Foucault, maybe right after Cool Memories III. D&D have been on penny pitchers and are coming up with one novel combo shot after another, quick to be tagged, laughing hysterically, generating
graphospasms, losing sight of the score. The Mutant section emerges from the starred purplish blacks skies on the pre-dawn horizon hour.

I also imagine Girl Talk coming out of retirement slumbers to remix The Mutant, The Meet, and Bomb Exchange into the graduate student neighbor bullshit sessions of A Naked Singularity to improve that work and help D&D each drink a liter of water before finding bed.

Maierhofer is the only other EL contemporary whose work is made of as many books as Shipley’s. You grip one of theirs, you find a dozen more flights for free.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edit: I regret to inform you this is getting a four.

I was vibing with this book so hard and then like halfway through I put it down to do other things and picked it back up a few hours later and some of the magic was gone, sadly. But I also think that if I continued to read it in one sitting it probably would have started seeping out from my ears like brain matter after a suicide so who knows, honestly.

So naturally, I'm torn on what to rate this because I genuinely want to give this a five while also fully acknowledging that all the pieces aren't quite there for me to give it a five, mostly because of the middle story, The Mutant, which potentially suffered from me putting the book down but also it just went on for way longer than it should have and that sort of body horror isn't my favorite, anyway.

I think the best thing about this book was the insane rants because I think more fiction should have insane rants. It gets the brain bees buzzing but in a positive way and not an "I should kill myself" way. I also like art and art world bullshit so I wasn't bothered by the esoteric nature of it in that regard.

This cover makes me want to vomit but I like how it looks like an art magazine, specifically, uh, Artforum? Sure.

I'm going to rate this later, she says.

[Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I texted my friend 3 separate times that I was going to rage-quit this book, but I persisted and finished it. My eyes glazed over no less than three-million-nine-hundred-eight-six-thousand-five-hundred-forty-four-and-a-half times.

I'm glad I finished it, but I don't necessarily feel rewarded. I responded very positively to the conceptual writing aspect, and that the author took a lot of liberties with form and convention. (I tend to respond positively to things like that.) It worked well enough at the beginning, but was hard to maintain through a 200-page novel.

[Jake Riswold · Rating 4 out of 5]

i can’t wait to spend my whole life trying to get smarter to fully understand this book. but the parts i did get… wow.