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MUSOS
Of course, I loved Laura.
I loved her my whole life.
At least, as much of it as I can remember.
And I guess, then, only most of it.
But I loved her.
And I didn’t kill her.
Don’t get me wrong, I killed that girl.
It wasn’t Laura.
The best that I can gather is, the best that I imagine is, the best that I can reason is, that when, that thing, I did do it, Laura died.
"Every human being in MUSOS has the flesh of every other human being in their stomach. To read MUSOS is to taste their unctuous gorge." – John Trefry, author of PLATS “A masterful exploration of obsession, tortured self-consciousness, and the transcendent allure of murder, which can be suppressed for a time but never overcome. At once philosophically expansive and physically relentless, Elsby has given us a first-person narrator as slippery as the best of Nabokov's, and an arena of violence as unflinching as the best of the New French Extremity, all of which somehow coalesces into a poignant story of true love.” – David Leo Rice, author of The New House "MUSOS is the most damning and incisive portrait of humanity and selfhood I've ever encountered. It is somehow operatically grandiose and entirely stripped-down. Elsby is the rare soul who can channel darkness and transform it. I will never, ever forget hearing her read the concluding pages of this book aloud. Its power radiates; it is more force than book." – Lindsay Lerman, author of What Are You
“Sartre says hell is other people, Wittgenstein says it’s yourself. In Musos, Charlene Elsby confronts something more we desire the hell in others.” – Andrew J. Wilt, author of Age of Agility and founder of 11:11 Press
I loved her my whole life.
At least, as much of it as I can remember.
And I guess, then, only most of it.
But I loved her.
And I didn’t kill her.
Don’t get me wrong, I killed that girl.
It wasn’t Laura.
The best that I can gather is, the best that I imagine is, the best that I can reason is, that when, that thing, I did do it, Laura died.
"Every human being in MUSOS has the flesh of every other human being in their stomach. To read MUSOS is to taste their unctuous gorge." – John Trefry, author of PLATS “A masterful exploration of obsession, tortured self-consciousness, and the transcendent allure of murder, which can be suppressed for a time but never overcome. At once philosophically expansive and physically relentless, Elsby has given us a first-person narrator as slippery as the best of Nabokov's, and an arena of violence as unflinching as the best of the New French Extremity, all of which somehow coalesces into a poignant story of true love.” – David Leo Rice, author of The New House "MUSOS is the most damning and incisive portrait of humanity and selfhood I've ever encountered. It is somehow operatically grandiose and entirely stripped-down. Elsby is the rare soul who can channel darkness and transform it. I will never, ever forget hearing her read the concluding pages of this book aloud. Its power radiates; it is more force than book." – Lindsay Lerman, author of What Are You
“Sartre says hell is other people, Wittgenstein says it’s yourself. In Musos, Charlene Elsby confronts something more we desire the hell in others.” – Andrew J. Wilt, author of Age of Agility and founder of 11:11 Press
188 pages, Paperback
Published March 25, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
April 3, 2022
"If the future couldn't change the past, we wouldn't bother with it..."
MUSOS lends itself very well to the subjective reader. It follows, in an Elsby stream-of-consciousness prose style that conflates the internal and external world of the narrator, a man who may-or-may-not have murdered a woman named Laura. Mystery ensues. The natural questions a reader poses to the fiction as it works on him become focal points as the fiction enters a lot of tangents that interrogate those assumptions. Who is Laura becomes when is Laura? Is this happening now? Is it all in the narrator's head? Is Laura "real", or is she every girl and woman this man has interacted with?
Skipping around, there is a pattern that emerges with the structure. It reaches back to the formative years, and the first sexual encounter the man has ever had, and, gradually, what emerged in my reading was that this guy, like most men out there when disassembled, operates from one core emotion: shame. It is the centrifugal, unexamined, and interrogated force that he is a slave to.
"...It's an atemporal verb, like the universe is rational. The universe is not currently being rational; it is rational despite the time. Eternity is coming, not like a wave about to crash over a cityscape, but like a wave in which we all are and always have been drowning."
Like much of Elsby's fiction, it's difficult to "like" her characters, but very easy to understand them (by the end). The nonchalance with which many men negotiate their every interaction is showcased in a liminal space--both within the head of the man and, presumably, some of the actions we can assume are in real life--that drives home a quiet, but pronounced and memorable, lasting horror of the socialized operating system of the modern man.
Tucked within that is a philosophy of entropy and temporal principles that drive home a different kind of scare: the future of this man, as it concerns his interactions with women, anyway, is inevitable. And perceptible by people around him. Though the narration is dominant over memory and real events (if those exist in the framework of the narration), making other characters such as Laura herself share a connection with the narrator's mind. Answering questions as they are thought. Anticipating his moves. Yet also, sometimes, behaving as and creates a dissonance that can't be reconciled even in this state of unrealiableness the narration never strays from. This creates a sickening complicit narrative for the people he interacts with, and we see often men constructing complete fictions about the target of their obsessions. The reader slips into exactly that as they try and construct the truth from the only information provided.
"I looked behind her at the window, and I saw my own face twice. Once was my reflection in the centre of the glass, enhanced by the darkness outside. Twice was a crude outline of my head, which she had drawn in magic marker on the bottom right-hand corner of the glass."
MUSOS lends itself very well to the subjective reader. It follows, in an Elsby stream-of-consciousness prose style that conflates the internal and external world of the narrator, a man who may-or-may-not have murdered a woman named Laura. Mystery ensues. The natural questions a reader poses to the fiction as it works on him become focal points as the fiction enters a lot of tangents that interrogate those assumptions. Who is Laura becomes when is Laura? Is this happening now? Is it all in the narrator's head? Is Laura "real", or is she every girl and woman this man has interacted with?
Skipping around, there is a pattern that emerges with the structure. It reaches back to the formative years, and the first sexual encounter the man has ever had, and, gradually, what emerged in my reading was that this guy, like most men out there when disassembled, operates from one core emotion: shame. It is the centrifugal, unexamined, and interrogated force that he is a slave to.
"...It's an atemporal verb, like the universe is rational. The universe is not currently being rational; it is rational despite the time. Eternity is coming, not like a wave about to crash over a cityscape, but like a wave in which we all are and always have been drowning."
Like much of Elsby's fiction, it's difficult to "like" her characters, but very easy to understand them (by the end). The nonchalance with which many men negotiate their every interaction is showcased in a liminal space--both within the head of the man and, presumably, some of the actions we can assume are in real life--that drives home a quiet, but pronounced and memorable, lasting horror of the socialized operating system of the modern man.
Tucked within that is a philosophy of entropy and temporal principles that drive home a different kind of scare: the future of this man, as it concerns his interactions with women, anyway, is inevitable. And perceptible by people around him. Though the narration is dominant over memory and real events (if those exist in the framework of the narration), making other characters such as Laura herself share a connection with the narrator's mind. Answering questions as they are thought. Anticipating his moves. Yet also, sometimes, behaving as and creates a dissonance that can't be reconciled even in this state of unrealiableness the narration never strays from. This creates a sickening complicit narrative for the people he interacts with, and we see often men constructing complete fictions about the target of their obsessions. The reader slips into exactly that as they try and construct the truth from the only information provided.
"I looked behind her at the window, and I saw my own face twice. Once was my reflection in the centre of the glass, enhanced by the darkness outside. Twice was a crude outline of my head, which she had drawn in magic marker on the bottom right-hand corner of the glass."
April 5, 2022
Sartre says hell is other people, Wittgenstein says it’s yourself. In Musos, Charlene Elsby confronts something more terrifying: we desire the hell in others.
June 4, 2022
The void does not care about this review.
Nor will this book reach other readers.
Perhaps the point is it’s pointlessness.
Nor will this book reach other readers.
Perhaps the point is it’s pointlessness.
December 16, 2023
Musos was put out as a limited edition release last year and the cover alone, and ok yeah the description too, was enough to make me snag one of my own. It's a page-number-less, tiny fonted cuckoo love letter to, or about, a woman named Laura, who our unnamed protagonist is clearly obsessed with and who he may or may not have killed. Don't worry, the book opens that way... I promise. I couldn't ruin this one for you if I tried.
Well, actually, this might ruin it for you... or who knows, maybe it'll make you wish you bought a copy... I dunno. But this book contains one of the goriest, most violent rape scenes I've ever read. And I don't know if knowing that it was written by a woman makes that more, or less, twisted. Because it's pretty fucking twisted.
I mean honestly, the ENTIRE BOOK is pretty fucking twisted. This dude is the pinnacle of unrequited love, yet I don't know that he knows that. He's in love with Laura, ridiculously disgustingly obsessed, he believes they have this whole history together, he peeping-tom's her through her windows to try to prove to himself that she doesn't exist when she isn't around him, that, in his mind, there is no way she wasn't created JUST TO EXIST for him...
This man wakes up believing he will die tomorrow. So today, well, it appears that today he did something wrong. And now he's absolutely lost his shitting mind.
"If I could only figure out how not to be human, everything would have turned out all right. If only I could have figured that out, we would have been fine."
The freaky thing about this book is that, without a doubt, there are dudes walking around out there convincing themselves that the women they are pining over actually love them, are just temporarily playing hard to get, feel the exact same feelings for them but are too shy to show it, when in reality the women probably have no idea who he is or that he harbors these feelings for her... it's so fucked up. Because it could be true. Imagine that. Someone, somewhere, right now, could be telling themselves you love them. And they just need to find you and corner you and make you admit it... Just fucking imagine.
...shivers...
Well, actually, this might ruin it for you... or who knows, maybe it'll make you wish you bought a copy... I dunno. But this book contains one of the goriest, most violent rape scenes I've ever read. And I don't know if knowing that it was written by a woman makes that more, or less, twisted. Because it's pretty fucking twisted.
I mean honestly, the ENTIRE BOOK is pretty fucking twisted. This dude is the pinnacle of unrequited love, yet I don't know that he knows that. He's in love with Laura, ridiculously disgustingly obsessed, he believes they have this whole history together, he peeping-tom's her through her windows to try to prove to himself that she doesn't exist when she isn't around him, that, in his mind, there is no way she wasn't created JUST TO EXIST for him...
This man wakes up believing he will die tomorrow. So today, well, it appears that today he did something wrong. And now he's absolutely lost his shitting mind.
"If I could only figure out how not to be human, everything would have turned out all right. If only I could have figured that out, we would have been fine."
The freaky thing about this book is that, without a doubt, there are dudes walking around out there convincing themselves that the women they are pining over actually love them, are just temporarily playing hard to get, feel the exact same feelings for them but are too shy to show it, when in reality the women probably have no idea who he is or that he harbors these feelings for her... it's so fucked up. Because it could be true. Imagine that. Someone, somewhere, right now, could be telling themselves you love them. And they just need to find you and corner you and make you admit it... Just fucking imagine.
...shivers...
November 17, 2025
3.5 ⭐️
Some quick thoughts
Unmoored from exactitude and the fuss of reliable narration, we are carried about the swirling and sinking (under)currents of our unnamed protagonist’s mind, memories, and his odyssey as he seeks Laura, the woman he loves. Our protagonist also believes that he will die tomorrow- not from any specific cause, he is just certain that it will happen. Sometimes it’s like that.
MUSOS is comparable to Elsby’s first two short novels, HEXIS and PSYCHROS, where her signature “interior” style (semi-stream-of-consciousness+philosophical rumination+linguistic weirding) melds with oft-surreal exteriors and plotting.
At the time of writing (Nov 2025), I’ve read all of Elsby’s full length works, so I’m especially excited for POOR DAMNED SOULS (Feb 2026), also from Merigold Independent.
Some quick thoughts
Unmoored from exactitude and the fuss of reliable narration, we are carried about the swirling and sinking (under)currents of our unnamed protagonist’s mind, memories, and his odyssey as he seeks Laura, the woman he loves. Our protagonist also believes that he will die tomorrow- not from any specific cause, he is just certain that it will happen. Sometimes it’s like that.
MUSOS is comparable to Elsby’s first two short novels, HEXIS and PSYCHROS, where her signature “interior” style (semi-stream-of-consciousness+philosophical rumination+linguistic weirding) melds with oft-surreal exteriors and plotting.
At the time of writing (Nov 2025), I’ve read all of Elsby’s full length works, so I’m especially excited for POOR DAMNED SOULS (Feb 2026), also from Merigold Independent.
July 10, 2024
This is a philosophical horror story that afterwards you question everything about that you just read.
May 17, 2022
In good Charlene Elsby fashion, Musos is both very complicated and quite compelling.
I don't know what's with me and non-straightfoward narratives, but I always feel like there's a very clear, but clever answer that keeps eluding me. For example, I was obsessed in my reading of Musos about the narrator being trans and Laura being the idealized woman in him. But I don't think it's it. Musos is a much more ethereal construction about memory, guilt, trauma and the straightforwardness of time. It is very much a total work of art too as I believe the pageless presentation is very much a part of the appeal. You're not reading a book as much as you're inside the mind of a guy who's lost his way inside of himself.
I don't know what's with me and non-straightfoward narratives, but I always feel like there's a very clear, but clever answer that keeps eluding me. For example, I was obsessed in my reading of Musos about the narrator being trans and Laura being the idealized woman in him. But I don't think it's it. Musos is a much more ethereal construction about memory, guilt, trauma and the straightforwardness of time. It is very much a total work of art too as I believe the pageless presentation is very much a part of the appeal. You're not reading a book as much as you're inside the mind of a guy who's lost his way inside of himself.
May 7, 2022
Rather disturbing to dive into the muddy mirror of guilt.. the folly of impossible death.
Laura's still watching...
Laura's still watching...
May 19, 2022
What a lovely person Charlene Elsby is. She sent me a signed copy of MUSOS with its eerie cover, and I was hooked based on the picture alone.
A few things struck me immediately about this book. Obviously the cover was one of them. The font and its varying sizes according to the thoughts and feelings that our unnamed narrator had. The lack of page numbers. It's all conducive to a foray into chaos, existentialism, and inner darkness that our Void Man experiences on his own terms. The whole book is like a circle. It's maddening, crazy, dreamy, and nightmarish. Our Void Man is filled with obsession and a need to possess others to feel like he is alive, real, actually here. A sinister quote that stuck with me was, "I wouldn't call it love, but whatever it is when you come to resent that another person's body isn't also yours."
This book reminded me of "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis and "The Demon" by Hubert Selby Jr. I very much enjoyed reading it, but I did have to put it down often to step away from the poison that was Void Man's life perspective. Kind of like that toxic friend who you need to mentally prepare for before you hang out together. Honestly, I had to fight myself on not giving it five stars. It's really well-written. My personal issues with it were that the tone seemed to remain the same throughout and I had hoped for a sort of climax that would lead to any kind of catharsis, and it didn't quite hit that. I was looking for an Aha! moment or some kind of satisfaction, and it might be my own fault for expecting that, but that's why I brought it down to a four-star rating.
Do find yourself a way to pick this up if you enjoy looking at life through the lens of the bleak and cold void.
A few things struck me immediately about this book. Obviously the cover was one of them. The font and its varying sizes according to the thoughts and feelings that our unnamed narrator had. The lack of page numbers. It's all conducive to a foray into chaos, existentialism, and inner darkness that our Void Man experiences on his own terms. The whole book is like a circle. It's maddening, crazy, dreamy, and nightmarish. Our Void Man is filled with obsession and a need to possess others to feel like he is alive, real, actually here. A sinister quote that stuck with me was, "I wouldn't call it love, but whatever it is when you come to resent that another person's body isn't also yours."
This book reminded me of "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis and "The Demon" by Hubert Selby Jr. I very much enjoyed reading it, but I did have to put it down often to step away from the poison that was Void Man's life perspective. Kind of like that toxic friend who you need to mentally prepare for before you hang out together. Honestly, I had to fight myself on not giving it five stars. It's really well-written. My personal issues with it were that the tone seemed to remain the same throughout and I had hoped for a sort of climax that would lead to any kind of catharsis, and it didn't quite hit that. I was looking for an Aha! moment or some kind of satisfaction, and it might be my own fault for expecting that, but that's why I brought it down to a four-star rating.
Do find yourself a way to pick this up if you enjoy looking at life through the lens of the bleak and cold void.
April 21, 2022
I don’t usually write reviews on here. I usually just give the book the stars and move on. But I felt compelled to say that this is the book of the year. Full stop. I haven’t read Elsby’s other work, but I will now. I haven’t felt terror and exhilaration like this in a while from the written word, and yet, here we are. A sumptuous feast of obsession, grime and violence that is more an experience than a simple read. Masterful.
May 22, 2022
I’m not sure what I just read. But I’m totally ok with that. I simultaneously didn’t want to stop reading, but also had to take my time and break this book up over a couple weeks. It was too intense to read to fast, and I think I also needed to let parts just sit with me for a while before continuing. Very glad I seemed this boom out and read it, and look forward to what the author has coming next.
May 3, 2022
The first thing you'll notice about MUSOS is the typeface - how it's a little small, a little cramped, and almost aggressively serifed in its design, calling to mind the reams upon reams of paper filled by Jack Torrance in The Shining - a physical manifestation of his fast-unravelling mental state.
The second thing you'll notice is the absence of page numbers. The book is divided into three parts, and sure, you can eyeball your progress as you go, but as far as keeping track of yourself and your surroundings - of how much you've read, or how much you have left - you're kinda shit outta luck. MUSOS is a demanding, consuming, tactile experience, and once you're in it, there's not much else for it except to press on until you find your way out.
Charlene Elsby is not fucking around.
Oftentimes, works of art that center on psychopathic characters will find ways to protect the reader. The camera will cut away. The narrative will be couched in dark humor or social satire. The killer will eventually face some kind of moral crisis or judicial comeuppance. The artist, out of fear, or kindness, will offer some respite - something to hold on to. MUSOS isn't that kind of book. It's not about a crazy person so much as what it feels like to be crazy. The narcissistic perversion of love. The unbreakable internal logic of obsessive mania. The inescapable double bind of the physical body and the dissociated mind. These are the things Elsby cuts to the heart of, in ways both new and startlingly familiar. Though plenty "out there", and more than disturbing enough to hang with chopped-n-screwed modern horror disruptors like B.R. Yeager, Grant Maierhofer, and Gary J. Shipley, Elsby's prose feels rooted in something older and weightier than formal experimentation. Her writing regularly calls to mind the most fully unhinged passages from Dostoyevsky or Kafka - that hardcoded, bedrock insanity that predates the internet and television and drug culture and much of modern psychiatry; the kind that just exists, as a permanent potentiality, tucked away inside us all.
MUSOS's nameless protagonist seems to encompass an array of archetypical misogynist tormentors - the alienated high school stalker, the angry adult incel, the grotesque "dirty old man" - but just as a hollow-eyed prostitute assures him near the end of the book "It's all the same. You're all the same." As he drifts between the past and present, recalling good times and bad with his beloved Laura, a picture emerges of his crosshatched desires - to both watch her from afar and be seen by her, worship her and control her, possess her (as an object) and possess her (as a demon), kill her and die for her. And though he's nothing if not an unreliable narrator, as our lone guide through their harrowing romance, it's hard not to see Laura at least a little bit through his eyes; as someone who was drawn to him through her own pain and detachment from the world around her. Indeed, in certain moments, he can almost feel like a human embodiment of her own suicidal ideations after the fact (though, just to be clear, this is not a reading I would put stock in so much as just a metaphor for the nature of their relationship). In the end, the difference between Laura and her nameless acolyte feels like one of commitment to their supposedly shared outlook. In the throes of disaffected teenage passion, she makes him promise that if he ever kills someone, it be her, and he holds her to it. That we only ever know her through his memories works as a damning indictment of the absolute darkest consequences of unchecked male privilege. He admits as much himself when he laments of his tortuous feelings for her "it's sickening how all of our systems depend on the buy-in of others."
Living inside this man's head for however many pages MUSOS demands made for one of my more visceral reading experiences in recent memory. He presents his tale in such freely digressive and unapologetically frank terms that it can almost feel more like something you're watching, or even living, than something you're reading - not unlike following around the recently released serial killer at the center of Gerald Kargl's Angst, or the philosophizing rapist at the heart of Mike Leigh's Naked (and while I'm loathe to compare much of anything to David Lynch, the introduction of the terrifying "ditch man" definitely brought to mind those loathsome visual manifestations of pure evil that only he knows how to conjure - the devil that feels all the more real for the very fact that only you can see him). MUSOS falls squarely into this rarefied tradition of unflinching psychological horror - the kind where the camera refuses to cut away - and just like all those diabolic visions, it has the presence of something fiendishly alive and willful, teeming with dark energy in search of an unnaturally curious host. That it will disappear from stores and sites in two weeks feels incredibly fitting - that we'll be left with nothing but the knowledge that it's out there, lurking in home libraries scattered throughout the country, no longer seekable or obtainable, but living among us. Watching us. Thinking about us. Hoping to be seen and chosen and understood. Waiting for its next beloved victim to happen along.
The second thing you'll notice is the absence of page numbers. The book is divided into three parts, and sure, you can eyeball your progress as you go, but as far as keeping track of yourself and your surroundings - of how much you've read, or how much you have left - you're kinda shit outta luck. MUSOS is a demanding, consuming, tactile experience, and once you're in it, there's not much else for it except to press on until you find your way out.
Charlene Elsby is not fucking around.
Oftentimes, works of art that center on psychopathic characters will find ways to protect the reader. The camera will cut away. The narrative will be couched in dark humor or social satire. The killer will eventually face some kind of moral crisis or judicial comeuppance. The artist, out of fear, or kindness, will offer some respite - something to hold on to. MUSOS isn't that kind of book. It's not about a crazy person so much as what it feels like to be crazy. The narcissistic perversion of love. The unbreakable internal logic of obsessive mania. The inescapable double bind of the physical body and the dissociated mind. These are the things Elsby cuts to the heart of, in ways both new and startlingly familiar. Though plenty "out there", and more than disturbing enough to hang with chopped-n-screwed modern horror disruptors like B.R. Yeager, Grant Maierhofer, and Gary J. Shipley, Elsby's prose feels rooted in something older and weightier than formal experimentation. Her writing regularly calls to mind the most fully unhinged passages from Dostoyevsky or Kafka - that hardcoded, bedrock insanity that predates the internet and television and drug culture and much of modern psychiatry; the kind that just exists, as a permanent potentiality, tucked away inside us all.
MUSOS's nameless protagonist seems to encompass an array of archetypical misogynist tormentors - the alienated high school stalker, the angry adult incel, the grotesque "dirty old man" - but just as a hollow-eyed prostitute assures him near the end of the book "It's all the same. You're all the same." As he drifts between the past and present, recalling good times and bad with his beloved Laura, a picture emerges of his crosshatched desires - to both watch her from afar and be seen by her, worship her and control her, possess her (as an object) and possess her (as a demon), kill her and die for her. And though he's nothing if not an unreliable narrator, as our lone guide through their harrowing romance, it's hard not to see Laura at least a little bit through his eyes; as someone who was drawn to him through her own pain and detachment from the world around her. Indeed, in certain moments, he can almost feel like a human embodiment of her own suicidal ideations after the fact (though, just to be clear, this is not a reading I would put stock in so much as just a metaphor for the nature of their relationship). In the end, the difference between Laura and her nameless acolyte feels like one of commitment to their supposedly shared outlook. In the throes of disaffected teenage passion, she makes him promise that if he ever kills someone, it be her, and he holds her to it. That we only ever know her through his memories works as a damning indictment of the absolute darkest consequences of unchecked male privilege. He admits as much himself when he laments of his tortuous feelings for her "it's sickening how all of our systems depend on the buy-in of others."
Living inside this man's head for however many pages MUSOS demands made for one of my more visceral reading experiences in recent memory. He presents his tale in such freely digressive and unapologetically frank terms that it can almost feel more like something you're watching, or even living, than something you're reading - not unlike following around the recently released serial killer at the center of Gerald Kargl's Angst, or the philosophizing rapist at the heart of Mike Leigh's Naked (and while I'm loathe to compare much of anything to David Lynch, the introduction of the terrifying "ditch man" definitely brought to mind those loathsome visual manifestations of pure evil that only he knows how to conjure - the devil that feels all the more real for the very fact that only you can see him). MUSOS falls squarely into this rarefied tradition of unflinching psychological horror - the kind where the camera refuses to cut away - and just like all those diabolic visions, it has the presence of something fiendishly alive and willful, teeming with dark energy in search of an unnaturally curious host. That it will disappear from stores and sites in two weeks feels incredibly fitting - that we'll be left with nothing but the knowledge that it's out there, lurking in home libraries scattered throughout the country, no longer seekable or obtainable, but living among us. Watching us. Thinking about us. Hoping to be seen and chosen and understood. Waiting for its next beloved victim to happen along.
July 14, 2024
Reading this book is like reading the handwritten manifesto of a psychotic, schizophrenic, obsessive stalker.
The writer’s academic background (philosophy and psychology, I believe) really comes through in this book’s experimentation. Thoughts are conceptualized and scattered like breadcrumbs trails that lead me to not understand a solid portion of what I was reading; truly didn’t grasp a lot of what was going on, but what I do know is I felt dirty and disgusting reading it.
Hard to recommend a book like this for a few reasons, such as the material itself and the hazard warnings that come with it, the fact that this book is impossible to obtain, and that people will think ill of you having read such a twisted book. I myself am unsure how to feel having read this thing, and will be using this as a baseline to evaluate future reads & whether or not they’re suitable for my taste, so for that I crown thee with a 2.5-3/5.
The writer’s academic background (philosophy and psychology, I believe) really comes through in this book’s experimentation. Thoughts are conceptualized and scattered like breadcrumbs trails that lead me to not understand a solid portion of what I was reading; truly didn’t grasp a lot of what was going on, but what I do know is I felt dirty and disgusting reading it.
Hard to recommend a book like this for a few reasons, such as the material itself and the hazard warnings that come with it, the fact that this book is impossible to obtain, and that people will think ill of you having read such a twisted book. I myself am unsure how to feel having read this thing, and will be using this as a baseline to evaluate future reads & whether or not they’re suitable for my taste, so for that I crown thee with a 2.5-3/5.
Read
October 27, 2022I bought this because I thought it was cool that Elsby was only going to keep the book in print for a limited time. Musos is very much a stream of consciousness narrative, perhaps about the abstraction of self through obsession and mental illness. I'm Thinking About Ending Things is a book that came to my mind while I was reading.
June 24, 2022
This is one where I am not exactly sure what I have just read, other than maybe the diary of a madman. It begs to be re-read even before the first page and I have to commend Elsby for allowing herself to truly let go because it certainly comes through.
August 15, 2022
Love and violence are two anchor points holding a taught razor wire. Excellent work by Charlene Elsby, and another great release from Merigold Independent.
February 14, 2024
Review forthcoming...
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews