Fucked Up

by Damien Ark

In Damien Ark’s debut novel, Fucked Up, seventeen-year-old Elliott attempts to survive the trauma of being the sole survivor of a serial killer while his abusive mother reinforces his inevitable cycle of self-destruction. Diagnosed with Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Elliott numbs himself with endless sex and drugs, blindly falls into the hands of rapists and murderers, but continues to search for some sense of hope in his life. Set in a postmodern dystopia on the verge of the apocalypse, Fucked Up is an eclectic take on transgressive literature that finds surreal romanticism under the grit of one of the most confrontational narratives ever written.

The book of the summer is now the novel of the year. Enter 2020, combustible and fraught, the mass lapsarian hangover, the Eschaton underway, the fires and floods, the privation, the mass casualties, the lifting of the veil on so-called public institutions, safety nets, governing norms and corporate bureaucracy as a cover for sex criminals, sociopathic predators and insidious drivers of perverse incentives, the drug-depredated populace. Fucked Up is a relentless onslaught of brutality to stagger the fainthearted, an incomparable monolith, a testament to what is printable, a spectacular orgy of the gruesome and profane, of violence and depravity raw, uncut and unadulterated, eerily prophetic, bearing an uncanny resemblance to modern times. This is a tender porn novel for the disaffected, a revelation that insists on your undivided attention, replete with endearing misfits and wanton disreputables. A radio dispatch from the basement of devastation and despair, spiritually righteous. Flickers of beauty and hope haunt each page, as our narrator reckons with their raw deal inheritance and the gift of life, friends and lovers, states of ecstasy and withdrawal, uncommon beauty in the scourged humanity of its world’s denizens. While Ark doesn’t exactly world-build, the atmosphere created here envelops and lingers in the sensorium. Once inside, a reader feels transfixed and their outlook execrated, awakened to the appalling nature of the status quo unmasked and hypocrisies laid bare, an emporium of horrors unimaginable here confronted, unflinching, with a tonal sleight of hand that straddles the comical, the absurd and the darkly distraught and dejected, the frank portrayal of destructive malevolence which through this book will leave indelible psychic marks. Like all redemptive art, Fucked Up ultimately comes to terms with its own hideousness via a tightrope gallows humor and unabashed zeal for the puncta of bliss the written word renders breathlessly. Peduncular, in bloom, unmistakably profound and uncompromising, Damien Ark boldly lays claim to the mantle of transgression as their birthright. It’s their lane now, and may you be emboldened by their audacity and permanently unlearn conformity. Get your angelic kicks before the coming storm, the spoils you reap will blind a god, somewhere between a prayer and a primal scream. Above all, Fucked Up is an antediluvian clarion call, a furious indictment, a work moral and political.

Genres: Fiction, Horror

858 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[brigid masaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucked Up is leviathan.

It's a book that'll break you. It's intent on shoving you face-down in festering piles of the worst humanity has to offer. It's a book that carves itself into your hippocampus. It is the first novel to give me nightmares. Fucked Up is about enduring the ugliest things one could imagine. It's also about healing, love, and the death-grip we maintain on hope in spite of it all.

I had some gripes about the book when I started reading. Sometimes the dialogue's rough; many characters don't have distinct voices, nor do they always speak with each other in ways that feel natural and human. There are sections that linger too long. But if you're looking for pristine, perfectly-edited, flawlessly-delivered narrative, you probably shouldn't be reading a literary debut from a DIY press run by a handful of extremely passionate people.

Despite minor flaws, Fucked Up delivers. Damien Ark portrays psychotic episodes, guilt, bouts of hopelessness, and desperate, fucked up love in ways that are completely incomparable. Elliott's struggle against demons both human and hallucinatory vary wildly from visceral to ethereal, but are always devastating and uniquely memorable. There is so much to be gleaned from his muddled relationships with others (for me in particular it's his relationship to Magnolia). The bits of comfort, joy, and hope throughout all come with such cost, and are all delivered with such earnest humanity. Sometimes hope is a stupidly-perfect Catholic twink who loves you when you can't stomach yourself. Sometimes it's a flower garden outside of a house of depravity. Sometimes it's the violent death of someone who's hurt you for too long.

Fucked Up is a profoundly difficult read. There are few people in my life I can recommend it to. All the same, it is a beautiful, horrifying piece of work like none other. My crazy gay ass is immensely thankful for it.

[KillerBunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Dark is not even the good word for this book. It's much worse. Nothing is ever pleasant in this story, the people you met along the pages are sick and lost.

Despair is my definition of this work.
Hope too but so little, it's hard to find.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a year, but I read this twice. It deserved to have attention paid to it. 853 pages each one giving credit to the book's title. If you're considering this book, I hope it isn't your first >300 pager, if you're considering this book, I hope you've strayed into the darker sides of indie before, or more hopefully, read some splatterpunk/extreme horror before.

I rec reading splatterpunk, not because this is that, but because it is NOT that.

There's this dark place, a hole, an endless pit to hell..., in this pit is all the fucked up, depraved, human excrement, and lusts, and sins, and desires that are not polite to discuss, or to approve of, or to fantasize about. The indie authors we claim we admire, whose books we tuck away when company is around feature this place in the background of their stories. They acknowledge it. They want you to cringe and praise and bow at their willingness to even be near it.

I’m not impressed by that anymore.

The splatterpunks, the extreme horror, the legions of copycats. They see that hole, want to see if they can fuck it. They dive right in. Oh and that shit’s fun, it can be a bit same-y, but it’s fun.

I’m desensitized to that now.

But Damien Ark, doesn’t just flirt with the extreme, he walks right up to it. Dances around it, maybe even crawls down into it a bit just to see how that feels. Fucked Up over the course of it’s many many pages paints a picture of grief, and loss, and longing, and lust, and drugs, and desperation. And it’s beautiful. It is visceral poetry, it’s damnation beautified.

It’s a coming of age road trip....with a bisexual schizophrenic psychopath confused drug addicted kid, through whose eyes we see the beauty of destruction, but also the pain of growing up, of being different, of feeling like everything is out to get you...

A book with the title Fucked Up, feels relatable at times. Probably that’s a bad thing. Whatever.

It’s long. It’s not without flaws, characters can sometimes sound undifferentiated, the endless something-worse-always-around-the-corner can be tedious. But generally these issues at best might slow down a reader for a moment, a 1/4th star off at worst.

But yes, if you’re someone who looks at trigger warnings, because you’re worried about content....you’ll find this to be shocking and offensive, maybe unreadable, if you look up trigger warnings because you think “more the merrier” perhaps you can appreciate the lines Ark does not cross, yet how close he comes, and how beautiful that border between can be.

I can’t not compare this to House of Leaves, if only because of the space it takes on my shelf, and because like House what the book is about, it’s genre, whatever, is a tad confusing. House of Leaves is a romance novel at it’s heart, masquerading as a weird meta fictional horror novel.

Fucked Up is a beautiful coming of age novel about hope, joy, and overcoming obstacles, masquerading as depraved indie shi..lit.

[Dylan McMahon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I respect the bravery of the author in writing an audacious and subversive narrative like this. It's clearly very personal and heartfelt and genuine. But the writing is very amateurish and needed a lot of editing. The awkward dialogue and repetitive prose did not make for an enjoyable reading experience.

[Lordpook · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to write a longer review, but for now, just know that as intense and graphic and dark as this book might sound, it's ultimately about hope and survival and never giving up on love. It's beautiful, exhilarating, deeply personal, and absolutely sincere. You can trust this book to tear you up and break your heart, because it will bring you back to life.

[Marilyn Roxie · Rating 4 out of 5]

When pre-ordering the book back in November, I didn't know how big it was going to be — over 800 pages! — but that would never have been a factor to either sway or deter me: I knew this was sure to be an impressive work, based on what I had read of Damien's writing elsewhere. The length is appropriate and necessary for a full exploration of what is contained within.

It could be tempting to describe this book as 'difficult', in its stark treatment of morality, mental illness, death, and more, where the route to freedom is far from a straight line, far from certain, where every chance of escape for our protagonist Elliott seems to nosedive into a previously unimaginable hell. 'Fucked Up' is certainly difficult, but it is also necessary: dealing directly with and deconstructing subjects that are part and parcel of our (indeed) fucked up world that are perpetually hidden and whispered about otherwise.

Within its pages, there are the cycles of all manners of abuse: leaving, remembering, returning, repeating. The brutal, hope(-less, and -ful), apocalyptic and often rainy atmosphere of 'Fucked Up' completely devours the reader for its duration, guided by Damien's skillful hand relentlessly carving out illumination, pain, music, and finally, release from the void of humanity's darkest depths. Strongly recommended.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s like A Little Life on acid.

[A.J. Sahnow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucked Up portrays an existence in search of hope. It is a haunted novel from the first line, our narrator Elliott being constantly confronted by the fucked up feelings he holds towards those already passed, those who marked his life. Abuse and trauma linger around the corners of every page, spectres of reality most people have the good luck to be able to ignore. But Fucked Up is about so much more than just the horrors of life. It's genuinely beautiful and powerful, frequently sweet and always empathic, even towards its most horrifying characters (of which there are a few).

Thematically this book is incredibly dense and complex. I've been reading Dennis Cooper's work since finishing it, and it's clear that Ark is a fan, but Ark is no Cooper clone; he builds on a foundation of Cooper-esque young fucked-up protagonists and those who exploit them, but takes those ideas into a realm of genre-fuckery, seamlessly fusing apocalyptic-Biblical dread, 'magical realism', horror, romance, Bildungsroman, family drama, and other elements coiled into the narrative. It's the kind of novel that Cooper himself would love.

Elliott's relationship with the world is complex, to say the least. He is knocked back and forth around the near-apocalyptic world of the book, witnessing and being touched by the very worst of us all. Yet at the same time he meets beautiful, troubled souls like him, those who give him reasons to continue in spite of the world and its fucked up contents. At times he is a reflection of the abuse he's suffered, at times he finds the strength or clarity (or lack thereof) to kick back. Often he falls into the hands of those he knows will do him harm simply because he has no other choice, but sometimes because trauma has done its best to engineer him that way.

Transgressive literature shows truth that scares most people because they can't live in knowledge of what this world is really like. Disney is much more comfortable, etc. You can save everyone, defeat the evil, and everything ends up swell. This is a privilege because if you've really seen the shit of life then you'll never have that comfort of ignorance. Fucked Up is a world where the worst of humanity is the mundane; our modern world at its extreme. Always truthful.

It's a dense monolith. Of course it's about abuse, addiction and disease, but that's just it — it is about 'everything', it's the world, the dark heart of the world — how can we find the sense to ever look away, how can we dare to live without looking away? how can we find the strength to smile or laugh honestly even just for a moment when the filth of life is all around us? there has to be a way — because, somehow, we do it — but how can we sustain those fleeting moments of ecstasy? could we ever live in hope? and what would that hope even look like?

Fucked Up tackles those questions despite the impossibility of coming to any firm answers. Ghosts will always be behind and in front of us, and around us in the present moment. They will be in our dreams and even materialise in our waking lives. But we face them with dignity, and with all of the strength we have been given from those we love, and those we have lost. Through this we can continue not just despite the ghosts, but through them — every ghost has its story, and we can learn from them, gain recognition from them, garner insights. We learn from the chaos, death and pain around us. We continue for those left behind, and those who fade too early.

Ark's prose is enviable: it is rough and brutal, yet equally precise and expansive. His characters all feel real, with their own lives, histories and goals — some of which are going to stick with me for a long time (Matthias, jfc). The plot progresses through stretches of crawling into sudden sprints, which I thought was a balance that worked perfectly. If we're going to get technical then some of the text 'could' have done with further drafting — indents and dashes being regular sizes, some spelling errors, but that's all pedantic in the context of this beast, because as the novel went on those formal 'errors' became a part of the story. It's not a clean little tale; it's a sprawling leviathan with battle scars, damaged and missing scales. Ark has so much to be proud of with this novel. It's one of the 'greatest works' I've read from our contemporary era.

And yet none of this is even cracking the surface of why I love this novel so much. This is a book with teeth. It could have been twice the length, honestly. I don't know what else to say. Maybe I'll edit this review and add more if it comes to me — I've already lent it to a friend so I can discuss it further with them. If this is your kind of book, you will cherish and treasure it.

Thank you, Damien Ark.

[Glen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went into this book expecting it to be a stereotype of edgy transgressive fiction, the kind of story that exists to offend those with delicate sensibilities. It's definitely transgressive and offensive, but "edgy" sells short the expertise with which the author conveys the struggles of a mentally ill child.

The novel is packed full of sexual deviancy, extreme violence, and psychological abuse, but the further one reads, the less these passages call attention to themselves. Instead, they convey the deep trauma that each character has endured (and continues to endure) in a way that skirting around the issue never could. The pain these characters go through can only be felt by throwing every act they suffer directly into the reader's face, and this assault continues, nay, escalates through all 800 pages of the story. The situations encountered in this book border on unbelievable, but are presented in such a way that makes the work seem almost like a non-fiction biography (save for the unreliable narrator). It feels as though the author is writing from personal experience, which adds a terrifying dimension to the whole story.

The plot ties itself together nicely, leaving few questions unanswered. There are a diverse cast of characters, each of which feel real and unique from each other. The faults in this book are mostly technical - misused words or mixed-up phrases. It can be difficult to tell which of these are due to the narrator's mental state and which are unintentional, but on occasion they were enough to force me to re-read a section of the story.

Much as I wish for everyone to have a glimpse of what these characters endure, I could not recommend this book to many people. Those who can survive the viscous storyline will exit the book with a new perspective on trauma, society, and relationships. If you've wanted to read a novel that tested your mental fortitude and your perspective on the western world, this is the book for you.

[Mark Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

By far the most graphic thing I've ever read. Exhaustive, exhausting and compulsively readable, this book is not just 'not for the faint of heart' but most definitely only for those 'strong of stomach' too. Depressing, relentless, upsetting, endless. You think it can't get worse for Elliott. And then it gets worse and worse and worse. I feel glad that I have finished it and can close the book get away from that headspace. I feel scarred by this book - the amount of times I went 'Jesus, this is Fucked Up' and then, of course, remmebered the novel, and the phrase in giant letters across the spine and I was like, well I was warned. I certainly have never read anything like it. Imagine an 800 page Dennis Cooper novel, but with emotions and feelings. And then you realise the horror of a Dennis Cooper novel with emotions and feelings. The sheer horror of it. I feel like I feel about when I watched the movie Irreversible - it's a well-made piece of art that I was glad I watched but I will never watch again. However, I am curious to see where Ark goes from here and what a future Ark novel would be.

Need to read something sweetness and light. Or ten things sweetness and light to balance this out.

[One thing, there are quite a few typos that I found irritating. Not a huge amount, but enough]

[grostulate]

Abandoned this 100 pages in :/

Shame, because all the signs were good, a friend recommended it, the themes were ones I’m usually interested, just didn’t vibe with the writing at all. Maybe it was down to me?

[Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Dennis Cooper wrote A Little Life.

[Jesse Larkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started Monday March 18th 2024 and finished on Monday April 22nd 2024
Fucked Up is a massive 850 page canvas following a schizophrenic teenager
Like a vinyl record the book is split into an a-side and a b-side with track listings for supposed chapter titles that we never see while we’re reading but are felt in retrospect
Presented as an unrelenting wave of text that doesn’t stop until you’ve reached the next section
Through its long form approach and by virtue of spending so much time in the world; characters are given the space and the freedom to function as figures that are weaving in and out of the present
Only with enough distance and time do you start to make sense of where you’ve been traveling
Feels like an expression of pent up frustration in every way
Drowning in the inescapable interiority of the protagonist
Battling empathy and revulsion for the central character—moments of genuine one to one identification and then utter disconnect
It’s about putting yourself through filth to obtain a semblance of control over your life or to unconsciously match your self-worth
Hurting the ones you’re closest to because you feel the safest with them
Being molded by abuse; how it infects and radiates outward, affecting the people around you unless you willingly put an end to it
Role playing our traumas to reach some sort of debased enlightenment
Projecting our biases onto others
Porn as an escape and a hyper fixated trap
Release through identification
How do we mourn and process our trauma
Self destruction
Opiate addiction
It’s apocalyptic in its thorough rejoicing of gore and sex and anarchy
Embraces its alienation
Confrontational and assaulting from the very first sentence
Picks and chooses when to deliver an abundance of pitch perfect specificity of details of outfits and surroundings and when to leave that up to the reader
The outer world becomes a reflection of his troubled interiority as Baltimore and the surrounding areas succumb to cultural turmoil
Descriptions of endless rain and violent purple skies
Decisions with irrevocable life consequences being made by impulsive, highly emotional teenagers
Schizophrenic episodes that play out like violent Looney toons vortexes of anarchy
Borders on gaysploitation wish fulfillment Endless paranoid delusions of persecution on the grandest scales
Horrifying sexual impulses confused with a morbid curiosity of death
Graphic sexual examination of these characters exposing a rotting libidinal truth
Rigorous
Shapeshifting
Written in a currency of cruelty
Forced to meet it on its own terms
Insatiable appetite for mayhem
Immersive and all encompassing it is something that consumes you in its gargantuan mouth
The experience of reading this was dizzying and my commitment to it made it feel like a lifestyle for the month that I was in it.