Description

The water is rising… Toilets overflow, and wages are low. Jobs are lost, and time is money. Time is money, and so is your body. Addictions relapse, and friendships falter. Meaning evades your grasp, and God is dead. God is dead, and so is your father… Your mind refuses you its secrets, and the immutable other, too often, tells the truth.

K Hank Jost’s charybdic anti-epic, MadStone, glitters with the strewn gore of every eviscerated day, the innards and excretions of both body and mind, unwinding a nauseous fugue of hungover prophecy, macerated identity, and the collapse of all distance between selves.

Far from pornographizing misery, MadStone nullifies it. Here, catastrophe is synonymous with the mundane.

With a near-biblical swagger and inscrutability, MadStone unravels the ruination of six lives in a contrapuntal plea against self-obsession, incuriosity, and the spectacle of disaster. As equally erudite as it is vehemently anti-academic, MadStone poses, once again, the unanswerable question of modernity: How, after all of this, are we meant to go on living?