Kroppen

by Jon Lindsey, Emma Hatt (Translator)

Lindseys debutroman är en melankoliskt pumpad odyssé genom Los Angeles. En svettig roadmovie, skriven på en prosa som piskar läsaren in i klibbiga gråzoner; scener vars höga underhållningsvärde framkallar lika mycket skratt som skam. Här spjälkas arvssynden, wrestling, sängrökning, organstölder och opiater med billigt sött vin och variga sår som aldrig läker.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, 21st Century, Summer, American, Book Club, Novels

148 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2021

Reviews

[Peter Topside]

Wow, I was not at all prepared for such a meaningful and deep story, after observing the hilarious cover. Poor Leland and his traumatic upbringing, leaving him damaged and unsure of everything. This book beautifully covers a wide range of topics from depression, death, substance and alcohol abuse, grieving, child abuse, and addiction. It has many spots that will make you laugh, which are needed with such heavy themes, but the emotional components are never lost. Jon Lindsey perfectly captures the mindset of the main character here, and brings you right into his scattered and impulsive decisions, with plenty of insight. It's short, but never misses a step, and the ending was perfect. It honestly reminded me of one of those indie movies that you watch because you can't sleep, it's free, and on late, but ends up hooking you in and leaving you with a lot of lasting thoughts. It may not be for everyone, namely those who have not had much experience with the aforementioned topics, but I think most people will have a very positive experience with Body High.

[Janie]

This book was so much more than I expected. There is a plethora of emotion flailing through a surrounding ocean of lies; protagonists who care for those that are too selfish to return the sentiment, drugs, ennui, and some very dangerous agendas . But the burgeoning strength and wisdom of the main character, mixed with episodes of humor, provide a balance to some very unstable circumstances. Recommended.

[Marion Lewandowski]

Pretty messed up but in a funny way. Would recommend to my gross friends but not my nice friends

[Selected Prose]

Body High is a masterpiece. I don’t use that term lightly. You will read it and be in awe of the fact that it’s Lindsey’s debut.

I refuse to spoil anything by discussing the story, because it’s a hell of a story with a gutting and astounding climax. Jon has managed to write a page-turner in gorgeous and poetic yet clean and concise prose. Sometimes “literary” novels get lost in their literariness, favoring aesthetic over story. Not this. Body High has reached a perfect equilibrium, which is so rare, and refreshing, and impressive.


Death. Love. Drugs. Black market organs. Wrestling. LA. Sperm donations. Guns. Family. Sex. Love (again). Life. It has everything.

In sum, Body High was hard to put down. I was sad that it ended at all. It was like waking up from a strange and twisted and beautiful dream. I wanted to live in it. I will certainly read it again (and again).


***I received a copy of this book in advance of publication, in preparation for an interview with the author***

[Allie Rowbottom]

So often in literary fiction, nothing happens. The writing may be good, but the plot itself is a snooze. Such is not the case in Jon Lindsey's BODY HIGH, a novel that turns, again and again, on conflicts both bombastic and utterly real. The result is sexy, dark, emotionally rich and incredibly well earned. This is a book that slaps. Like the palm of a rough, weathered, loving hand, right on the fattest ass cheek, where it feels best.

[Evan Femino]

Felt like a solid little 90s/early 00s indie film throwback. Good shit.

[Aaron Lindsey]

This is one of those rare books that I never want to end. It's short, disturbing, and full of every emotion.
Leland is a confused, lonely kid who makes his living by selling his vital organs and participating in high paying, but very risky medical experiments.
When his younger, beautiful aunt arrives on the scene, the story starts to unfold.
Shocking in many areas, funny, sad, and beautiful, I highly recommend this one.

[pragna]

some kind of grotesque fever dream

[Kevin Maloney]

Body High is a careening drug frenzy through the ashes of Los Angeles. Imagine Michelangelo’s Pietà if Christ had an oozing boil on his ass. Garbage Pail Kids as high art. Jon Lindsey plunges us in a fetid river of organ thieves and incest, and pulls us up baptized.

[Paige Hettinger]

EDIT 9/30/36: so i had been searching for this book everywhere for a few years now. i was really, really close to trying to order it directly from the publisher's site because i couldn't understand why it was nowhere. i guess it was out of print, because it published first in 2021, but my copy reflected a reprint in 2025. i am so glad i turned around in mcnally jackson one afternoon and saw this disgusting cover in the staff picks section and gasped in delight. the cover is seriously gross as fuck and that was the main reason i needed to see what was going on here, and why i went into it fairly blind.

i expected a really gross book, though, naturally, so let me start by saying either i am immune to extremely gross at this stage of my reading life, or it wasn't actually that bad. some stuff got a "yuck!" face out of me but overall......like yeah sure. but it was really funny, and it was much, much darker and more depressing than it seems.

i haven't read a lot of contemporary fiction that captures this feeling of ennui as mere boredom so precisely, just a pervasive sense of boredom and burnout felt towards every facet of life. when it does dip into the gross, lindsey is so good at the abject. it's disgusting in a good way, i'd say the best description for it is "pus-soaked" for the grimy and dank tone. and then it gets, more than anything, really perverse.

another thing i haven't seen people brave enough to do in a while: oedipal anxiety. lindsey was really good at the character development here, hitting all the right beats and revealing information with an explicit but shadowed approach. i read this before the news broke about the re-opening of the cornell gang rape case, and i'm writing this after, and i want to preface what i am about to say with that.

when it gets into the incest stuff, you are either in or you are kicked out. it was compelling, it was disturbing, it did not shy away from going all-in on the thought processes, repetitions of abuse, and cycles of trauma. most glaringly, it exposed this male inability to see themselves as able to be victims of sexual abuse, which is a real problem, and can sometimes lead to what happens here, a repetition of patterns because they cannot understand what has happened to them, so they sense but cannot process a wrongness, and they do that wrong again. it's perverted in the simplest of terms but it's also really sad. the narrator was an adult and a kid and an abuser and the abused, from all sides. it's ultimately a portrayal of a man who is grappling with lacking bodily autonomy in a similar fashion to how women have to contend with their autonomy being challenged every day on ever level. not so fun now, is it!

the narrator (i know he has a name sorry i cant remember it rn and i'm sleepy i'll look it up later!!!) feels so much disgust towards himself overall, but he also feels disgusted by his mother for having even been the victim of CSA, can verbally say it's wrong and then also not know how to stop his own actions. by the end, he acts out goodness in response to a final violation, but he's done too much bad to get there to redeem himself -- and he knows it. he can only understand himself and his family in a context of sickness, mental or physical, and i haven't even gotten into the bodily experimentation he signs himself up for regularly for cash -- it's something you do when you not only have a complete and total disregard for your body and your health, but it's also a means of punishing your body for any perceived wrongdoing to or by it. long-term abuse can really render you a non-functional adult, and this man is non-functional.

men can know better and still not know what they've done. they can do wrong and know that and also not know it. the book does not by any means absolve anyone of anything, but it plays in the gray areas. anyone who has ever engaged in any form of sexual relations knows that consent can be a fraught concept and is dubious more frequently than it is enthusiastic, and things can get weird and violent and upsetting and you don't always know what happened, really, to get there. maybe there is a part of me that was so receptive to this book and its prodding because i want to know that somewhere deep inside the person who violated me is an awareness that he did something wrong, that blackout drunk girls can’t consent. the book was a little too perverse, even for me, but in a challenging way, not an offensive one. again, to me. i thought it was highly empathetic if you allow yourself to embrace the complicated nature of it.

what i wouldn't give for a research paper on this. IDK i'm a little lost in the sauce right now and need to tighten this up before it goes on substack.

OG: nothing about this book was what i expected. nothing. once again i will return with thoughts.

[Phillip Freedenberg]

Jon Lindsey’s Body High is a brilliantly burning,dazzlingly paced, high energy nebula which follows a beautiful and heartbreaking arc through a new cosmos of intoxicating prose which is dizzyingly inspired that includes a trajectory founded upon love, dark humor, family, addiction, loss, pain, and pathos, all of which reminds us as readers that we are each seeking in the complexity of our daily lives some transcendent hand to reach out and let us know that, not only somehow, in someway it will one day be ok, but also somewhere in the impossible density of the fractured nature of the world and each other, we are in fact all connected, and this book is one of those hands that reaches out to let you know that when the nebula finally does crash and leave behind its own new universe spilled out in text onto the page, we will be all that remains, even if “ever so slowly,” we too, “disappear into that unity.”

-Phillip Freedenberg
Author of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic

Buffalo, NY
February 2022

[Luke]

A nightmare story under the burning hot California sun of dissociated, dissatisfied, and delusional people navigating a world that makes less and less sense, fuelled by opiates and generational abuse. Written in sharp, concise sentences, this novel was nearly impossible to put down.

[Ethan Ksiazek]

“I remember kissing my mom with tongue. As a child. Eating spaghetti in my underwear, I was imitating lovers on
television. Asking for a kiss. Then forcing my noodles into
her mouth. She threw me from the couch
‘Kissing like that is for people in love,’ she said.
‘I love you,’ I said.”

[Edward]

Oh Jon Lindsey, what the hell did I just read. I was brought to you by Sam Pink, Tao Lin and a girl I met through tinder in 2018 (we visited soft skull publishing 5 years ago and they gave us some free books). I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just say that the cover of this book is atrocious. And as a debut novel, it’s fantastic.

[Oliver]

Thoroughly enjoyed this debut novel by Mr Lindsey who paints an excellent picture of what its like to be washed out and depressed with a oozing pimple on your bum in LA. It's sad, funny and brave in Lindsey's painful honesty about family trauma and drug addiction. I wish it was longer. Can't wait for more of his stuff :)

[Steven]

Started as a 5 then fell to a 3. The book's magic waned by the midpoint. The storyline with the protagonist's daughter was unbelievable. A kid wouldn't act like she did after being kidnapped. Instead it was like the protagonist had visitation rights and took her to the beach for the day. I understand the ending was meant to have some poetry to it, but it was at the expense of believability. I would read something else by this writer. The first half of the book had a unique energy. I'm interested in what he does next.

[Brooks Sterritt]

"The bed is burning, her own mother’s quilt is tucked under her chin, the manic, skeletal grin of her second-hand dentures beside her in a glass of water—but then it’s not my mom, it's Jolene on the futon, body like a gummy worm, seizures from electroshocks—hot coffee burns my hands—the heat of Jolene saying, 'Don’t you want to kiss me?'—and my mom’s feet touching me in bed, so ice cold they were on fire."

[Peter Landau]

Finally, a book that doesn’t end in recovery. That shows the smorgasbord of Los Angeles and not the usual one-course meal. That’s funny but not a joke. That has characters and a plot that makes you want to keep going. Plus, I do judge a book by its cover. This one has the best I’ve seen in years. What’s the novel about? Why don’t you read it! That’s how this shit works.

[Max Restaino]

I really enjoyed this. Well written, gross, and super propulsive. I saw some comparisons to movies by the Safdie Brothers and I can absolutely see that; Body High strikes a great balance between fun & stressful.

[M Ross Perkins]

It's like Hunter S. Thompson drank a bunch of lean and rewrote the story of Oedipus. Fantastic. The first novel I've ever picked up and read cover-to-cover in one sitting. Could not put it down.

[Emma French]

'Body High' eller 'Kroppen' (svensk översättning: Emma Hatt, utgiven av Cycle Press) är Jon Lindseys debutroman publicerad första gången år 2020. På personligt plan känns det fint att läsa något så nutida, något som dessutom inte är svenskt. Egentligen hade jag kunnat tänka mig att läsa den på originalspråk, men hade inte Cycle Press gett ut boken hade jag nog aldrig kommit i kontakt med den. Dessutom gillade jag översättningen, texten hade allt annat än förlorat sin personlighet.
Jag tyckte verkligen om att läsa 'Body High', även om Rebeckas äcklade känsla till det amerikanska bokomslaget stämmer ganska bra överens med texten i sig. Det är groteskt större delen av tiden, jag äcklas av de öppna såren, blodet, knarket, sexet, det förgängliga och destruktiviteten. Men jag finner också något vackert i Lindseys användande av orden, det är poetiskt och ja experimentellt? Han är inte först men det har inte blivit tråkigt, tvärtom fascinerar det mig hur han hoppar mellan nutiden o minnen, mellan dröm och verklighet. Att skriva vackert är en sak men Lindsey lyckas använda det vackra gentemot det groteska till en bok du inte kan lägga ifrån dig. Sa det till Rebecka, det är kul att läsa böcker lika lätt som man ser på en TV-serie. Det behöver inte vara en stor uppgift att läsa och den här har jag längtat efter att plocka upp. Varför vet jag inte riktigt? Är inte så mycket för Californien eller kärlek. Eller sex o knark för den delen. Men huvudkaraktären gör någon slags resa man gärna följer, för mitt i alla knasiga val och brottsliga snedsteg för han tankemonologer som nästan får mig att förstå honom.
Om ni ska läsa den är gassande sol en bra location. Och Cycle Press mer intetsägande omslag gör att fantasin får flöda och texten leva sitt egna liv - det tycker jag om. För ett år sedan läste jag 'Tripprapporter' av Tone Schunnesson och i tanken nu när jag ser tillbaks finner jag någon likhet i författandet. Tone beskriver äcklet men hon gör det vackert, inte romantiserande alltså utan vackert, man måste vara våga sig omslutas av spyan

[janeee :D]

i understand the acclaim

[Agnes]

En ride!!

[Downward]

body high is thick with inherited trauma and smeared with the self harm and pain that comes with trying to adjust to that trauma in real time as dramatic events that encapsulate a lifetime of bruised spirit play over a compacted timeline. lindsey writes poetically and sparsely and this is as much a fast paced genre novel as it is a literary contemplation of like really really bad stuff. there is some connective tissue that is missing or some things I wanted called back that seemed to disappear mysteriously into the rush toward the ending but life plays out like that often, where dramas are supplanted and what seem like the most important and unmanageable pain in our lives is right around the corner from a darker, more unmanageable thing. it's also pretty funny, though it's contents don't really match the garbage pail kids cover.

[Sara Gerot]

This book is gross and funny and exciting and interesting. It is provocative in all ways a book could ever be. The narrator's self-involvement is on the level of debilitating and I found this really humorous. Just a really great read.

[Tyler Barney]

aptly compared to the Safdie brothers’ films and praised by Garielle Lutz as ‘the debut of a remarkably gifted writer,’ Body High is a good time in the worst way

[Shawn]

One huge downer of a book about the cyclical nature of sexual abuse in families and one mans drug addled attempt at trying to set things straight (after sampling it himself, of course). Pitch black in tone and subject matter with possibly the only levity coming from a clear caricature of famous wrestler Ric Flair (only washed-up here), it's one thing after another, but I found myself drawn to the detached flow of consciousness narration and was easily swept into this books miserable, grueling world.

Shame, addiction, denial, doubt, repression, self-hatred, escapism, depression. The horror, the horror.

[Caroline Lövstedt]

När höga förväntningar möter hög leverans bildas ljuv musik. Eller i alla fall ljuvliga meningar. Musiken föreställer jag mig som skränig från en bilradio med spruckna högtalare. Precis som allt annat i den här boken: spruckna kroppar, löften, öden, barndomar.
Lindseys språk är fantastiskt. Jag vet inte riktigt vad han gör men han gör det bra.
Ibland upplevde jag att han kanske krånglade till texten lite och jag fick lite svårt att hänga med. Men det är ok. Jag förlåter honom allt.

[Daehee]

After getting hooked by the Kindle sample I renewed a subscription to “Amazon Unlimited” to finish the rest; will likely buy a physical copy. Beautifully written, a grotesque adventure whips you through numerous scenes of LA. Though funny and sad from the dark comic absurdity of the whole situation, the book is really a horror story in disguise about a hereditary psychological cycle that can never end, with everyone down the chain both perpetrator and victim.

[Colby 🪩]

I genuinely don’t know how to feel about this book. It was giving creative writing 101 on the prose but the plot was insane. If this book was one page longer I would’ve crawled out of my skin and puked from reading it. Absolutely repulsive.