Keith Rawson writes with fire and fury, taking a sledgehammer to your comfort zones and exposing you to all manner of ugliness. And he also never mixes metaphors the way I just did.
THE CHAOS WE KNOW is an amazing and disturbing collection that drags you down (quite willingly) into the bowels of human suffering. Rawson’s characters are meth-heads, corrupt cops, pervs, trannies, cannibals. The earliest stories in the book are more like snippets, really, slice-of-life bits that serve as appetizers for the more fully fleshed out stories later. Rawson’s style is bold and aggressive and raw. We need more writers with balls like this.
Only one negative comment, and it has nothing to do with Rawson’s abilities as a writer: some typos and formatting issues that would occasionally pull me out of the story, especially toward the second half of the book. But these weren’t near enough to spoil the experience. THE CHAOS WE KNOW heralds the arrival of a major talent.
Yep, a fantastic collection.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to read this. Knowing the guy, I'm sure the fiction his as fearless as he is.
ReplyDeleteHow embarrassing. If you made note of any of those typos or formatting issues shoot me an email and I will fix. I'll have to go back through it again.
ReplyDeleteStil laughing at the mixed metaphor joke.
ReplyDeleteYes, bold and aggressive and raw sums it up.