Caring Is Creepy

This book was ... difficult. It's well-written, with great voice, but it's just ... fucked up. That's really the only way to say it.

Art can be rough. Art can be scary. Art can be dark. It doesn't make the art bad, but it certainly doesn't make for a pleasant experience.

If I'm quite honest, I'm not sure what I got out of reading the book other than sort of the same type (not exactly the same, vis a vis scale and reality) of feeling as your 9/11 attack, or your Paris attacks (Charlie Hebdo or the nightclub campaign) — this is a thing that is possible. These are events and feelings that exist in the world, and from now on whenever I try to take a thought or an idea and skin it around my particular conceptual framework of How Things Are, it will forever have this sharp corner jutting out. The book's not reality (it's fiction), but the things that happened in it are not conceptually or practically impossible. They're barely even improbable, in some respects.

If you plan on making your way through this novel, make sure you have a nice chaser book prepared for after.