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Belfie Hell
Belfie Hell is anti-roman ... anti-novel ... anti-anti-novel ... I awoke wrong ... incorrect ... nightmarish ... scared ... drained from a blessing ... hounded by pig cops ... held in riots not anticipated. My shipmates began to read my mind. I bathed in a parody of my real self. I was shrewd ... inept ... but I was calculating pride ... thus I had to speak ... put word down.
300 pages, Paperback
First published June 14, 2018
2 people are currently reading
151 people want to read
About the author
Shane Jesse Christmass
27 books93 followersShane Jesse Christmass is the author of ‘Acid Shottas'. He’s a member of the band Mattress Grave, and firmly believes that the future of the word, the novel, will be in synthetic telepathy.
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Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 6, 2018
Belfie Hell is a travelogue of a world reduced to mere information, our surroundings rendered frightening and alien; a world too cluttered to effectively parse. It’s a novel trapped in an endless cycle of expansion and contraction, destruction and revision, like an auto-immune disorder forcing the host-body to attack itself until it becomes something new and unthinkable.
June 14, 2018
Christmass is a mad genius... his sustained lunacy and indulgence in the rhythm of his prose is athletic. This is the wild ride of thriller fiction that thoughtful readers of literature would enjoy while lying on the shore of a polluted lake.
December 11, 2018
Full Review
Belfie Hell is an odd, intense, and unique experience. Many will find it incredibly frustrating and it's certainly not for everyone. However, it manages to be both very experimental and yet very entertaining at the same time. Several of the scenes in the book are incredibly engaging, it parodies pop culture in a way that's humorous but never pretentious, and has insightful looks into the possibilities of language. If you're up for a challenging read, I highly recommend this.
Belfie Hell is an odd, intense, and unique experience. Many will find it incredibly frustrating and it's certainly not for everyone. However, it manages to be both very experimental and yet very entertaining at the same time. Several of the scenes in the book are incredibly engaging, it parodies pop culture in a way that's humorous but never pretentious, and has insightful looks into the possibilities of language. If you're up for a challenging read, I highly recommend this.
August 19, 2021
The following is a list of things that reading Belfie Hell made me want to do: draw a mile-long hopscotch court; mix Tahitian Treat and Goldschlager; operate heavy machinery; stick glitter star stickers all over my shoes; create a chopped-and-screwed remix of Girl Talk's Feed the Animals; steal people's robot pool cleaners and set them free in the ocean; climb a tree so tall I couldn't get back down; watch Southland Tales on repeat for a full 24 hours; take a hot air balloon ride over Biloxi at midnight; buy a plush adult-sized dinosaur onesie; swallow everlasting gobstoppers whole like medicine; learn karate; read more books from Inside the Castle.
This shit is bananas. Full stop. I generally try not to include too many comparisons to other works in my reviews because no writer really wants to hear how much their book is like some other writer's book, but in the case of Belfie Hell - a throbbing, Akira-esque wall of cultural references - the practice is kind of unavoidable, so let me preface it with the caveat that Belfie Hell is not, in any way, like anyone else's book that you have ever read. It's just not.
That said, if I had to describe it to the uninitiated, I'd say it's kinda like if someone took William Burroughs, William Gibson, and the last 10 years-or-so of US Weeklys, ran them all through an industrial shredder, and loaded the resultant shreds into one of those glass booth wind tunnel contraptions from gameshows where people step inside and money blows all around and they try and grab as much as they can in the allotted time, except instead of money it's words you're trying to grab. It's like being in the eye of a word tornado, or standing in a word decontamination shower, or getting your skull word pressure-washed. They're just coming at you, for 300 solid pages, and no matter how hard you might try to parse them in the beginning, before long they overwhelm you, and wash over you, and your brain just kinda starts picking and choosing which ones it wants, and what they mean. For me, in its rhythms and cadences at least, it read a little like hardboiled detective fiction, and what recognizable beats it hit felt, maybe, a little like The Matrix - narrated by a first person Neo, with Master P as Morpheus, Mia Goth as Trinity, Mr. Smith "pig cops" everywhere, Shia LeBouf as... I dunno, Cypher? and "the underage guy James Franco fucked" (actual recurring character name) popping in and out of the story as needed. Oh, and it's set in New Orleans, in and around the Superdome, amid some future societal collapse. And maybe also the collapse of objective reality. Or something. I think.
But that's honestly probably just me. Your mileage will unquestionably vary. Because the coolest thing about reading Belfie Hell is that it doesn't feel like reading at all. It feels like something entirely else. Something altogether new. An altered state. A higher plane of consciousness. A different way of thinking about language and the ways in which we consume it (and it consumes us). I don't feel like author Shane Jesse Christmass told me a story so much as he prompted me to tell myself one. I spent the first ten pages wondering if I was reading it right, and the next 290 convinced there was no way to read it wrong. In that way, it is a strangely unselfish work of art. I honestly don't quite know how he did it, but it was an utterly unique and enthralling ride.
This shit is bananas. Full stop. I generally try not to include too many comparisons to other works in my reviews because no writer really wants to hear how much their book is like some other writer's book, but in the case of Belfie Hell - a throbbing, Akira-esque wall of cultural references - the practice is kind of unavoidable, so let me preface it with the caveat that Belfie Hell is not, in any way, like anyone else's book that you have ever read. It's just not.
That said, if I had to describe it to the uninitiated, I'd say it's kinda like if someone took William Burroughs, William Gibson, and the last 10 years-or-so of US Weeklys, ran them all through an industrial shredder, and loaded the resultant shreds into one of those glass booth wind tunnel contraptions from gameshows where people step inside and money blows all around and they try and grab as much as they can in the allotted time, except instead of money it's words you're trying to grab. It's like being in the eye of a word tornado, or standing in a word decontamination shower, or getting your skull word pressure-washed. They're just coming at you, for 300 solid pages, and no matter how hard you might try to parse them in the beginning, before long they overwhelm you, and wash over you, and your brain just kinda starts picking and choosing which ones it wants, and what they mean. For me, in its rhythms and cadences at least, it read a little like hardboiled detective fiction, and what recognizable beats it hit felt, maybe, a little like The Matrix - narrated by a first person Neo, with Master P as Morpheus, Mia Goth as Trinity, Mr. Smith "pig cops" everywhere, Shia LeBouf as... I dunno, Cypher? and "the underage guy James Franco fucked" (actual recurring character name) popping in and out of the story as needed. Oh, and it's set in New Orleans, in and around the Superdome, amid some future societal collapse. And maybe also the collapse of objective reality. Or something. I think.
But that's honestly probably just me. Your mileage will unquestionably vary. Because the coolest thing about reading Belfie Hell is that it doesn't feel like reading at all. It feels like something entirely else. Something altogether new. An altered state. A higher plane of consciousness. A different way of thinking about language and the ways in which we consume it (and it consumes us). I don't feel like author Shane Jesse Christmass told me a story so much as he prompted me to tell myself one. I spent the first ten pages wondering if I was reading it right, and the next 290 convinced there was no way to read it wrong. In that way, it is a strangely unselfish work of art. I honestly don't quite know how he did it, but it was an utterly unique and enthralling ride.
February 6, 2022
reading this will give you a headwound and then that wound will animate like something out of a cronenberg film. celebrities are our fulcrum here, they appear, get mutilated or mutilate themselves and then regenerate in following vignettes/scenes, do it all over again, etc. this is a mutilated narrative, perhaps with profound connotations. the banal smashed up with the hyperreal, giving off a vivid holy/unholy glow. maybe i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about. shane jesse christmass is a literary wizard, forges hard hard shit out of chaos, not unlike guyotat or celine, but you haven't read a voice like his or any book like this. it's a call to arms to wrest art back from our capitalist overlords, our lives from pig cops.
September 29, 2019
"I act as a focal point for Shia LeBeouf."
February 22, 2024
If you took the horror out of House Of Leaves and replaced it with anti-capitalist and anti-cop ideals, but it works.
You don't so much read it as much as you try to keep up with it. If you're looking for a fast and shattered look at a punk un-novel then this is the one for you.
You don't so much read it as much as you try to keep up with it. If you're looking for a fast and shattered look at a punk un-novel then this is the one for you.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews