Just Starting: Me and The Devil, By Nick Tosches

[Lucky]

My library hold came up today for the novel Me and The Devil, by Nick Tosches. Read these blurbs and tell me if they interest you as much as they do me:

Review Me and the Devil

"This is the best, from one of the best writers around. Nick Tosches knows the devil as well as any man has."--Keith Richards

"Words and wisdom that I shall carry with me into the fucking dirt."--Johnny Depp

"If there was ever any doubt that Nick Tosches is the Dark Prince of literary fiction, Me and the Devil should settle the matter. The single, most brain-searingly dangerous man of letters. Read him at your peril."--Anthony Bourdain

"A dark narrative that cleverly blurs the lines between reality and fantasy....Tosches takes readers on an unpredictable journey through disturbing and erotic desires ....excellent."--Booklist

"By turns profane, obscene, perhaps even blasphemous, Tosches's fictional account of 'the most diabolically fucked-up year of my life' is like a cross between William S. Burroughs and J.K. Huysmans."--Ron Hogan, Shelf Awareness Pro

"Tosches has created an erotic asphalt odyssey that takes him on a subcutaneous awakening, drifting through a world of hallucinations, dark secrets and dangerous desires."--Peter Wolf

"During his long career, Toshces has earned a reputation as a writer who doesn't mess around....Me and the Devil is Tosches touching his outer limits. It's a compulsively readable tale of sadomasochistic obsession and Faustian misbehavior: a meta-rumination on aging, sex, and the nature of art."--Tony O'Neill, BlackBook

"Another chapter in Tosches's unflinchingly perverse literary output."--The New Yorker

[lookin]

"Tosches has created an erotic asphalt odyssey that takes him on a subcutaneous awakening, drifting through a world of hallucinations, dark secrets and dangerous desires."

I certainly hope he'll send you back to us in one piece.

[Lucky]

Now, I guess thanks to Google, my web pages have ads for this novel. Or is the devil behind it? I can tell you one thing, Nick Tosches is a fierce writer, and this novel is something to be savored rather than gulped down. (That explains why I have only read 20 pages so far!)

[Lucky]

Well, I am at 100 pages so far, and I am not sure how many more I will read. The writing is terrific, the social commentary biting, but the main story is about this alcoholic who has lost his teeth yet tries to lure younger women for sex so he can, with his false teeth, bite them and suck their blood. This excites him to the point that he decides to get sober so that he can enjoy the moments to their fullest. And so far, he has done that.

But I am not into blood, and the lengthy descriptions he gives of the women's beauty do not do much for me. He does seem to be condescending to the world and see himself as better than the rest of us, even those of us who have our teeth and have not met the demons that he has met, so very up close and personal too. No doubt the book has its readership, but it is due back to the library on Monday, and it will go back even if I have not finished it.