Last Days

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Kline is thrown around, his physical strenght never in full potential, never allowing him an easy way out - but then so is the power of his opponents. The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. The Brotherhood of Mutilation makes for a great foil, probably because the idea isn't that far-fetched. And were I to do a more thorough and more detailed reading, I would find all kinds of other religious references.

After learning this, I went back and reread the conclusion to the Brotherhood section, and I must admit that would have made for one hell of a powerful novella. At the same time, there is, in the mutilates’ microcosm, in a bloody denial of the functionality of the body (which also implies a blind and strictly normative concept of a perfectly functioning body, one of many exclusionary tactics pursued by the brotherhood), a strangely functionalist thinking involved. It’s actually made up of two novellas that both follow Kline on his journey, trying to end the exhausting cycle and get out alive. His prose is taut, his language and sentences so bare that they are almost transparent, letting the reader into the mind and confusion of Kline's character. Also, as several excellent reviews by individual bloggers from the Franco-belgian Fric Frac Club collective have shown, Evenson’s work is wide open to readings employing, for example, Deleuzian philosophy.Last Days” bears all the weight of not just being a good book on its own, but of tying its own story and “The Brotherhood of Mutilation” into a single novel, so naturally, it’s different. You don't get much in the way of who the main character is but the little bit you do get about him from the time prior to when the book starts sounds kind of sucky for him, then as things progress it doesn't get much better. The book gets crazier and crazier as Kline falls deeper into the rabbit hole that is the Brotherhood of Mutilation.

En definitiva, ha sido una historia con mucho potencial, como digo, todo lo relacionado con el culto y el fanatismo es lo más interesante.This is a story about a man forced into action and thrust into a secret world filled with amputees, mutilatees's, and Paul. The cult hierarchy is grotesque - high-level amputees (with, you guessed it, the highest number of amputations) won't speak with "ones" or "twos" (those with only one or two amputations). You can’t have your arm amputated at the shoulder and claim to have amputated seven limbs: five fingers, one hand, one arm.

If, on the other stump, you're still feeling the warm glow of your own twisted curiosity, than, by all means, proceed to Item 3. Anyway, I’m not sure I ‘got’ this book but I still found it entertaining (is that a weird word to use? I love the way that Evenson kept us the reader, and our hero in the dark through most of this, only revealing to us the true plot "piece by piece"! If you took Kafka's The Trial and morphed it with Palahniuk's macabre sensibilities and sprinkled in the Book of Revelations, you might could get within spittin' distance of Brian Evenson's writing. The clinical tone with which Evenson is able to traverse such situations, and the strange stark architecture of their world, makes even the most insidious or repulsive situations seem plausible, mathematical, nearby.I devoured it in one sitting while waiting for car repairs, wondering how the rest of the patrons weren't shaken up by the events within. The world doesn’t become more rational, more sane once Kline leaves one of the two brotherhoods which have set their eyes on him.